rude but not inaccurate.
«And whose fault is it that Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, wouldn't trust me with better?» Abivard retorted. The prospect of discomfiting Maniakes made him better able to tolerate Tzikas, so that came out as badinage, not rage. He went on, «If you think they're bad now, you should have seen them when I first got them. Eminent sir, they're brave enough, and they are starting to learn their trade.»
«I'd cheerfully trade them for a like number of real soldiers nonetheless,» Tzikas said, again impolite but again correct.
Abivard said, «It's settled, then. We advance against Maniakes and demonstrate in front of him, with luck making him abandon his base here. And as he moves south, we have a force waiting to engage him. We don't have to win; we simply have to keep him in play till it's too late for him to sail out of Lyssaion.»
«That's it,» Tzikas said. He bowed to Abivard. «A plan worthy of Stavrakios the Great.» The Videssian renegade suddenly suffered a coughing fit; Stavrakios was the Avtokrator who'd smashed every Makuraner army he had faced and had occupied Mashiz. When Tzikas could speak again, he went on: «Worthy of the great heroes of Makuran, I should have said.»
«It's all right,» Abivard said magnanimously. In a way he was relieved Tzikas had slipped. The cavalry officer did do an alarmingly good job of aping the Makuraners with whom he'd had to cast his lot. It was just as well he'd proved he remained a Videssian at heart.
Abivard wasted no time sending a good part of his army south along the Tutub. Had he seriously intended to defeat Maniakes as the Avtokrator headed for Lyssaion, he would have gone with that force. As things were, he sent it out under the reliable Turan. He commanded the rest of the Makuraner army, the part demonstrating against Maniakes in his lair.
His force included almost all of Tzikas' cavalry regiment. That left him nervous in spite of the accord he seemed to have reached with the Videssian renegade. Having betrayed Maniakes and Abivard both, was he now liable to betray one of them to the other? Abivard didn't want to find out.
But Tzikas stayed in line. His cavalry fought hard against the Videssian horsemen who battled to hold them away from Maniakes' base. He reveled in fighting for his adopted country against the men of his native land and worshiped the God more ostentatiously than did any Makuraner.
Maniakes once more took to breaking canals to keep Abivard's men at bay. Flooding was indeed a two- edged sword. Wearily, Abivard's soldiers and the local peasants worked side by side to repair the damage so the soldiers could go on and the peasants could save something of their crops.
And then, from the northeast, the smoke from a great burning rose into the sky, as it so often had in the land of the Thousand Cities that summer. More wrecked canals kept Abivard's men from reaching the site of that burning for another couple of days, but Abivard knew what it meant: Maniakes was gone.
VII
Abivard glared at the peasant in some exasperation. «You saw the Videssian army leave?» he demanded. The peasant nodded. «And which way did they go? Tell me again,» Abivard said.
«That way, lord.» The peasant pointed east, as he had before.
Everyone with whom Abivard had spoken had said the same thing. Yes, the Videssians were gone. Yes, the locals were glad– although they seemed less glad to see a Makuraner army arrive to take the invaders' place. And yes, Maniakes and his men had gone east. No one had seen them turn south.
He's being sneaky, Abivard thought. He'll go out into the scrub country between the Tutub and Videssos and stay there as long as he can, maybe even travel south a long way before he comes back to the river for water. You could travel a fair distance through that semidesert, especially when the fall rains—the same rains that would be storms on the Sailors' Sea—brought the grass and leaves to brief new life.
But you could not travel all the way down to Lyssaion without returning to the Tutub. Even lush scrub wouldn't support an army's horses indefinitely, and there weren't enough water holes to keep an army of men from perishing of thirst. And when Maniakes came back to the Tutub, Abivard would know exactly where he was.
True, Maniakes' army could move faster than his. But that army, burdened by a baggage train, could not outrun the scouting detachments Abivard sent galloping southward to check me likely halting places along the Tutub. If the scouts came back, they would bring news of where the Videssians were. And if one detachment did not come back, that would also tell Abivard where the Videssians were.
All the detachments came back. None of them had found Maniakes and his men. Abivard was left scratching his head. «He hasn't vanished into the Void, however much we wish he would,» he said. «Can he be mad enough to try crossing the Videssian westlands on horseback?»
«I don't know anything about that, lord,» answered the scout to whom he'd put the question. «All I know is I haven't seen him.» Snarling, Abivard dismissed him. The scout hadn't done anything wrong; he'd carried out the orders Abivard had given him, just as his fellows had. Abivard's job was to make what the scouts had seen—and what they hadn't seen—mean something. But what?
«He hasn't gone south,» he said to Roshnani that evening. «I don't want to believe that, but I haven't any choice. He can't have chosen to fight his way across the westlands. I won't believe that; even if he made it, he'd throw away most of his army in the doing, and he hasn't got enough trained men to use them up so foolishly.»
«Maybe he headed into Vaspurakan to try to rouse the princes against our field force again,» Roshnani suggested.
«Maybe,» Abivard said, unconvinced. «But that would tie him down in long, hard fighting and make him winter in Vaspurakan. I have trouble thinking he'd risk so much with such a distance and so many foes between him and country he controls.»
«I'm no general—the God knows that's so—but I can see that what you say makes sense,» Roshnani said. «But if he hasn't gone south and he hasn't gone into the Videssian westlands and he hasn't gone to Vaspurakan, where is he? He hasn't gone west, has he?»
Abivard snorted. «No, and that's not his army camped around us, either.» He plucked at his beard. «I wonder if he could have gone north, up into the mountains and valleys of Erzerum. He might find friends up there no matter how isolated he was.»
«From what the tales say, you can find anything up in Erzerum,» Roshnani said.
«The tales speak true,» Abivard told her. «Erzerum is the rubbish heap of the world.» The mountains that ran from the Mylasa Sea east to the Videssian Sea and the valleys set among them were as perfectly defensible a terrain as had ever sprung from the mind and hand of the God. Because of that, almost every valley there had its own people, its own language, its own religion. Some were native, some survivors whose cause had been lost in the outer world but who had managed to carve out a shelter for themselves and hold it against all comers.
«The folk in some of those valleys worship Phos, don't they?» Roshnani asked.
«So they do,» Abivard said. «What I'd like to see is Videssos pushed back into one of those valleys and forgotten about for the rest of time.» He laughed. «It won't happen any time soon. And the Videssians would like to see us penned back there for good. That won't happen, either.»
«No, of course not,» Roshnani said. «The God would never allow such a thing; the very idea would appall her.» But she didn't let Abivard distract her, instead continuing with her own train of thought: «Because some of them worship Phos, wouldn't they be likely to help Maniakes?»
«Yes, I suppose so,» Abivard agreed. «He might winter up there. I have to say, though, I don't see why he would. He couldn't keep it a secret the winter long, and we'd be waiting for him to try to come back down into the low country when spring came.»
«That's so,» Roshnani admitted. «I can't argue with a word of it. But if he hasn't gone north, south, east, or west, where is he?»
«Underground,» Abivard said. But that was too much to hope for.
He made his own arrangements for the winter, billeting his troops in several nearby cities and overcoming the city governors' remarkable lack of enthusiasm for keeping them in supplies.
«Fine,» he told one such official when the man flatly refused to aid the soldiers. «When the Videssians
