the canals for me.»
«When is anything ever as easy as you think it will be?» Glathpilesh demanded. He pointed to the tray of songbirds, which was empty now. «There. You see? As I said, you never get all you want.»
«Getting all I want is the least of my worries,» Abivard answered. «Getting all I need is another question altogether.»
Glathpilesh eyed him with sudden fresh interest and respect «For one not a mage—and for one not old—to know the difference between those two is less than common. Even for mages, need shades into want so that we must ever be on our guard against disasters spawned from greed.»
To judge from the empty tray in front of him, Glathpilesh was intimately acquainted with greed, perhaps more intimately acquainted than he realized—no one needed to devour so many songbirds, but he'd certainly wanted them. The only disaster to which such gluttony could lead, though, Abivard thought, was choking to death on a bone, or perhaps getting so wide that you couldn't fit through a door.
Utpanisht said, «May the God grant you find a way to use our magic as you had hoped and drive the Videssians and their false god from the land of the Thousand Cities.»
«May it be as you say,» Abivard agreed. He was less sure it would be that way now than he had been when he had decided to use the flood as a weapon against Maniakes. But no matter what else happened, the Videssians would not be able to move around on the plain between the Tutub and the Tib as freely as they had been doing. That would reduce the amount of damage they could inflict.
«It had better be as Utpanisht says,» Glathpilesh said. «Otherwise a lot of time and effort will have gone for nothing.»
«A lot of time,» Abivard echoed. The wizards, as far as he was concerned, had wasted a good deal of it all by themselves. They, no doubt, would vehemently disagree with that characterization and would claim they had spent time wisely. But whether wasted or spent, time had passed—quite a bit of it. «Not much time is left for this campaigning season. We've held Maniakes away from Mashiz for the year, anyhow.»
That was exactly what Sharbaraz King of Kings had sent him out to do. Sharbaraz had expected he'd do it by beating the Videssians, but making them shift their path, making them fight even if he couldn't win, and then using water as a weapon seemed to work as well.
«As harvest nears, the Videssians will leave our land, not so?» Utpanisht said. «They are men; they must harvest like other men.»
«The land of the Thousand Cities grows enough for them to stay here and live off the countryside if they want to,» Abivard said, «or it did before the flood, at any rate. But if they do stay here, who will bring in the harvests back in their homeland? Their women will go hungry; their children will starve. Can Maniakes make them go on while that happens? I doubt it.»
«And I as well,» Utpanisht said. «I raised the question to be certain you were aware of it»
«Oh, I'm aware of it,» Abivard answered. «Now we have to find out whether Maniakes is—and whether he cares.»
With the countryside flooded around them, the Videssians no longer rampaged through the land of the Thousand Cities. Not even their skill at engineering let them do that. Instead, they stayed near the upper reaches of one of the Tutub's tributaries, from which they could either resume the assault they had carried on through the summer or withdraw back into the westlands of their own empire.
Abivard tried to force them to the latter course, marching out and joining up with Turan's force before moving—sometimes single file along causeways that were the only routes through drowned farmlands—against the Videssians. He sent a letter off to Romezan up in Vaspurakan, asking him to use the cavalry of the field force to attack Maniakes once he got back into Videssos. The garrisons holding the towns in the Videssian westlands weren't much better equipped for mobile warfare than were those that had held down the Thousand Cities.
Word came from out of Videssian-held territory that Maniakes' wife, Lysia—who was also his first cousin— not only was with the Avtokrator but had just been delivered of a baby boy. «There—do you see?» Roshnani said when Abivard passed the news to her. «You're not the only one who takes his wife on campaign.»
«Maniakes is only a Videssian bound for the Void,» Abivard replied, not without irony. «What he does has no bearing on the way a proper Makuraner noblewoman should behave.»
Roshnani stuck out her tongue at him. Then she grew serious once more. «What's she like—Lysia, I mean?»
«I don't know,» Abivard admitted «He may take her on campaigns with him, but I've never met her.» He paused thoughtfully. «He must think the world of her. For the Videssians, marrying your cousin is as shocking as letting noblewomen out in public is for us.»
«I wonder if that's part of the reason he's brought her along,» Roshnani mused. «Having her with him might be safer than leaving her back in Videssos the city while he's gone.»
«It could be so,» Abivard said. «If you really want to know, we can ask Tzikas. He professed to be horrified about Maniakes' incest—that's what he called it—when he came over to us. The only problem is, Tzikas would profess anything if he saw as much as one chance in a hundred that he might get something he wants by doing it.»
«If I thought you were wrong, I would tell you,» Roshnani said. She thought for a moment, then shook her head. «If finding out about Lysia means asking Tzikas, I'd rather not know.»
Abivard gave the Videssian renegade such praise as he could: «He hasn't done anything to me since he came here from Vaspurakan.»
Roshnani tempered even that: «Anything you know of, you mean. But you didn't know everything he was doing to you before, either.»
«I'm not saying you're wrong, either, mind you, but I am learning,» Abivard answered. «Tzikas doesn't know it, but slipping a few arkets to his orderlies means I read everything he writes before it goes into a courier's message tube.»
Roshnani kissed him with great enthusiasm. «You are learning,» she said.
«I should be clever more often,» Abivard said. That made her laugh and as he'd hoped, kiss him again.
The closer his army drew to Maniakes' force, the more Abivard worried about what he'd do if the Videssians chose battle instead of retreat. Tzikas' regiment of veteran cavalry stiffened the men he already had, and half of those garrison soldiers had fought well even if they had lost in the end. He was still leery of the prospect of battle and suddenly understood why the Videssians had been so hesitant about fighting his army after losing to it a few times. Now he felt the pinch of that sandal on his foot.
In the fields the peasants of the Thousand Cities worked stolidly away at repairing the damage from the breaches in the canals he'd had the wizards make. He wanted to shout at them, try to make them see that in so doing they were also helping to turn Maniakes loose on their land once more. He kept quiet. From long, often unhappy experience, he knew a peasant's horizon seldom reached farther than the crop he was raising. There was some justification for that way of thinking, too: if the crop didn't get raised nothing else mattered, not to the peasant who stood to starve.
But Abivard saw farther. If Maniakes got loose to rampage over the land between the Tutub and the Tib once more, these particular peasants might escape, but others, probably more, would suffer.
He found himself glancing at the sun more often than usual. Like anyone else, he looked to the sky to find out what time it was. Nowadays, though, he paid more attention to where in the sky the sun was rising and setting. The sooner autumn came, the happier he would be. Maniakes would have to withdraw to his own land men… wouldn't he?
If he did intend to withdraw, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he sent out horsemen to harass Abivard's soldiers and slow their already creeping advance even further. With Abivard's reluctant blessing, Tzikas led his cavalry regiment in a counterattack that sent the Videssians back in retreat.
When the renegade tried to push farther still, he barely escaped an ambush Maniakes' troopers set for him. On hearing that, Abivard didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. Seeing Tzikas fall into the hands of the Avtokrator he'd tried to slay by sorcery would have been the perfect revenge on him even if Abivard had decided not to hand him over to Maniakes.
«Why can't you?» Turan asked when Abivard grumbled about that «I wish you would have after he came down here, no matter what he said about his regiment.» He paused thoughtfully. «The cursed Videssian's not a
