conspicuously not shouting Tzikas' name—the Videssian army rode forward again. Fewer arrows flew from their bows, and fewer from those of the Makuraners as well. A lot of quivers were empty. Picking up shafts from the ground was not the same as being able to refill those quivers.
«Stand fast!» Abivard called. He had never seen a Videssian force come into battle with such grim determination. Maniakes' men were out to finish the fight one way or the other. His own foot soldiers seemed steady enough, but how much more pounding could they take before they broke? In a moment he'd find out.
Swords slashing, the Videssians rode up against the Makuraner line. Abivard hurried along the line to the place that looked most threatening. Trading strokes with several Videssians, he acquired a cut—luckily a small one—on the back of his sword hand, a dent in his helmet, and a ringing in the ear by the dent. He thought he dealt out more damage than that, but in combat, with what he saw constantly shifting, he had trouble being sure.
Peering up and down the line, he saw the Videssians steadily forcing his men back despite all they could do. He bit his Up. If the Makuraners did not hold steady, the line would break somewhere. When that happened, Maniakes' riders would pour through and cut up his force from in front and behind. That was a recipe for disaster.
Forcing the enemy back seemed beyond his men's ability now that his stratagem had proved imperfectly successful. What did that leave him? He thought for a moment of retreating back into Zadabak, but then glanced over toward the walled city atop its mound of ancient rubbish. Retreating uphill and into the city was liable to be a nightmare worse than a Videssian breakthrough down here on the flatlands.
Which left… nothing. The God did not grant man's every prayer. Sometimes, even for the most pious, even for the most virtuous, things went wrong. He had done everything he knew how to do here to beat the Videssians and had proved to know not quite enough. He wondered if he would be able to retreat on the flat without tearing the army to pieces. He didn't think so but had the bad feeling he would have to try it anyhow before long.
Messengers rode and ran up to him, reporting pressure on the right, pressure on the left, pressure in the center. He had a last few hundred reserves left and fed them into the fight more in the spirit of leaving nothing undone than with any serious expectation that they would turn the tide. They didn't, which left him facing the same dilemma less than half an hour later, this time without any palliative to apply.
If he drew back with his left, he pulled away from the swamp anchoring that end of the line and gave the Videssians a free road into his rear. If he drew back with his right, he pulled away from Zadabak and its hillock. He decided to try that rather than the other plan, hoping the Videssians would fear a trap and hesitate to push between his army and the town.
A few years before the ploy might have given Maniakes pause, but no more. Without wasted motion or time he sent horsemen galloping into the gap Abivard had created for him. Abivard's heart sank. Whenever he'd been beaten before, here in the land of the Thousand Cities, he'd managed to keep his army intact, ready to fight another day. For the life of him, he didn't see how he was going to manage that this time.
More Videssian horn calls rang out. Abivard knew those calls as well as he knew his own. As people often do, though, at first he heard what he expected to hear, not what the trumpeters blew. When his mind as well as his ear recognized the notes, he stared in disbelief.
«That's retreat» Turan said, sounding as dazed as Abivard felt. «I know it is,» Abivard answered. «By the God, though, I don't know why. We were helpless before them, and Maniakes surely knew it.»
But the flankers who should have gotten around to Abivard's rear and started the destruction of the Makuraner army instead reined in and, obedient to the Avtokrator's command, returned to their own main body. And then that main body disengaged from Abivard's force and rode rapidly off toward the southeast, leaving Abivard in possession of the field.
«I don't believe it,» he said. He'd said it several times by then. «He had us. By the God, he had us. And he let us get away. No, he didn't just let us get away. He ran from us even though we couldn't make him run.»
«If battle magic worked, it would work like that,» Turan said. «But battle magic doesn't work or works so seldom that it's not worth the effort. Did he up and go mad all of a sudden?»
«Too much to hope for,» Abivard said, to which his lieutenant could only numbly nod. He went on, «Besides, he knew what he was doing, or thought he did. He handled that retreat as smoothly as any other part of the battle. It's only that he didn't need to make it… did he?»
Turan did not answer that. Turan could not answer that any more than Abivard could. They waited and exclaimed and scratched their heads but came to no conclusions.
In any other country they would have understood sooner than they could on the floodplain between the Tutub and the Tib. On the Pardrayan steppe, on the high plateau of Makuran, in the Videssian westlands, an army on the move kicked up a great cloud of dust. But the rich soil hereabouts was kept so moist, little dust rose from it. They did not know the army was approaching till they saw the first outriders off to the northeast.
Spying them gave rise to the next interesting question: whose army were they? «They can't be Videssians, or Maniakes wouldn't have run from them,» Abivard said. «They can't be our men, because these are our men.» He waved to his battered host.
«They can't be Vaspurakaners or men of Erzerum, either, or Khamorth from off the steppe,» Turan said. «If they were any of those folk Maniakes would have welcomed them with open arms.»
«True. Every word of it true,» Abivard agreed. «That leaves nobody, near as I can see. By the kind of logic the Videssians love so well, then, that army there doesn't exist.» His shaky laugh said what such logic was worth.
He did his best to make his army ready to fight at need. Seeing the state his men were in, he knew how forlorn that best was. The army from which Maniakes had fled drew closer. Now Abivard could make out the banners that army flew. As with the Videssian horn calls, recognition and understanding did not go together.
«They're our men,» he said. «Makuraners, flying the red lion.»
«But they can't be,» Turan said. «We don't have any cavalry force closer than Vaspurakan or the Videssian westlands. I wish we did, but we don't.»
«I know,» Abivard said. «I wrote to Romezan, asking him to come to our aid, but the King of Kings, in his wisdom, countermanded me.»
Still wondering, he rode out toward the approaching horsemen. He took a good-sized detachment of his surviving cavalry with him, still unsure this wasn't some kind of trap or trick—though why Maniakes, with a won battle, would have needed to resort to tricks was beyond him.
A party to match his separated itself from the main body of the mysterious army. «By the God,» Turan said softly.
«By the God.» Abivard echoed. That burly, great-mustached man in the gilded armor– Now, at last, Abivard rode out ahead of his escort. He raised his voice: «Romezan, is it really you?»
The commander of the Makuraner mobile force shouted back: «No, it's just someone who looks like me.» Roaring laughter, he spurred his horse, too, so that he and Abivard met alone between their men.
When they clasped hands, Romezan's remembered strength made every bone in Abivard's right hand ache. «Welcome, welcome, three times welcome,» Abivard said most sincerely, and then, lowering his voice though no one save Romezan was in earshot, «Welcome indeed, but didn't Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, order you to stay in the westlands?»
«He certainly did,» Romezan boomed, careless of who heard him, «and so here I am.»
Abivard stared. «You got the order—and you disobeyed it?»
«That's what I did, all right,» Romezan said cheerfully. «From what you said in your letter, you needed help, and a lot of it. Sharbaraz didn't know what was happening here as well as you did. That's what I thought, anyhow.»
«What will he do when he finds out, do you think?» Abivard asked.
«Nothing much—there are times when being of the Seven Clans works for you,» Romezan answered. «If the King of Kings gives us too hard a time, we rise up, and he knows it.»
He spoke with the calm confidence of a man bom into the high nobility, a man for whom Sharbaraz was undoubtedly a superior but not a figure one step—and that a short one—removed from the God. Although Abivard's sister was married to the King of Kings, he still retained much of the awe for the office, if not for the man who held it for the moment, that had been inculcated in him since childhood. When he thought it through, he knew how little sense that made, but he didn't—he couldn't—always pause to think it through.
Romezan said, «Besides, how angry can Sharbaraz be once he finds out we've made Maniakes run off with
