his tail between his legs?»
«How angry?» Abivard pursed his lips. «That depends. If he decides you came here to join forces with me, not so you could go after Maniakes, he's liable to be very angry indeed.»
«Why on earth would he think that?» Romezan boomed laughter. «What does he expect the two of us would do together, move on Mashiz instead of twisting Maniakes' tail again?»
«Isn't this a pleasant afternoon?» Abivard said. «I don't know that I've seen the sun so bright in the sky since, oh, maybe yesterday.»
Romezan stared at him, the beginning of a scowl on his face. «What are you talking about?» he demanded. Fierce as fire in a fight, he wasn't the fastest man Abivard had ever seen in pursuit of an idea But he wasn't a fool, either; he did eventually get where he was going. After a couple of heartbeats the scowl vanished. His eyes widened. «He truly is liable to think that? Why, by the God?»
For all his blithe talk a little while before about going into rebellion, Romezan drew back when confronted with the actual possibility. Having drawn back himself, Abivard did not think less of him for that. He said, «Maybe he thinks I'm too good at what I do.»
«How can a general be too good?» Romezan asked. «There's no such thing as winning too many battles.»
His faith touched Abivard. Somehow Romezan had managed to live for years in the Videssian westlands without acquiring a bit of subtlety. «A general who is too good, a general who wins all his battles,» Abivard said, almost as if explaining things to Varaz, «has no more foes to beat, true, but if he looks toward the throne on which his sovereign sits…»
«Ah,» Romezan said, his voice serious now. Yes, talking of rebellion had been easy when it had been nothing but talk. But he went on, «The King of Kings suspects you, lord? If you're not loyal to him, who is?»
«If you knew how many times I've put that same question to him.» Abivard sighed. «The answer, as best I can see, is that the King of Kings suspects everyone and doesn't think anyone is loyal to him, me included.»
«If he truly does think that way, he'll prove himself right one of these days,» Romezan said, tongue wagging looser than was perfectly wise.
Wise tongue or not, Abivard basked in his words like a lizard in the sun. For so long everyone around him had spoken nothing but fulsome praises of the King of Kings—oh, not Roshnani, but her thought and his were twin mirrors. To hear one of Sharbaraz' generals acknowledge that he could be less man wise and less than charitable was like wine after long thirst.
Romezan was looking over the field. «I don't see Tzikas anywhere,» he remarked.
«No, you wouldn't,» Abivard agreed. «He had the misfortune to be captured by the Videssians not so long ago.» His voice was as bland as barley porridge without salt: how could anyone imagine he'd had anything to do with such a misfortune? «And, having been captured, the redoubtable Tzikas threw in his lot with his former folk and was most definitely seen not more than a couple of hours ago, fighting on Maniakes' side again.» That probably wasn't fair to the unhappy Tzikas, who had problems of his own—a good many of them self-inflicted—but Abivard couldn't have cared less.
«The sooner he falls into the Void, the better for everybody,» Romezan growled. «Never did like him, never did trust him. The idea that a Videssian could ape Makuraner manners—and to think we'd think he was one of us… not right, not natural. How come Maniakes didn't just up and kill him after he caught him? He owes him a big one, eh?»
«I think he was more interested in hurting us than in hurting Tzikas, worse luck,» Abivard said, and Romezan nodded. Abivard went on, «But we'll hurt him worse than the other way around. I've been so desperately low in cavalry till you got here, I couldn't take the war to Maniakes. I had to let him choose his moves and then respond.»
«We'll go after him.» Romezan looked over the field once more. «You took him on with just foot soldiers, pretty much, didn't you?» Abivard nodded. Romezan let out a shrill little whistle. «I wouldn't like to try that, not with infantry alone. But your men seem to have given the misbelievers everything they wanted. How did you ever get infantry to fight so well?»
«I trained them hard, and I fought them the same way,» Abivard said. «I had no choice: it was use infantry or go under. When they have confidence in what they're doing, they make decent troops. Better than decent troops, as a matter of fact.»
«Who would have thought it?» Romezan said. «You must be a wizard to work miracles no one else could hope to match. Well, the days of needing to work miracles are done. You have proper soldiers again, so you can stop wasting your time on infantrymen.»
«I suppose so.» Oddly, the thought saddened Abivard. Of course cavalry was more valuable than infantry, but he felt a pang over letting the foot soldiers he'd trained slip back into being nothing more than garrison troops once more. It seemed a waste of what he'd made them. Well, they'd be good garrison troops, anyhow, and he could still get some use out of them in this campaign.
Romezan said, «Let's clean up this field here, patch up your wounded, and then we'll go chase ourselves some Videssians.»
Abivard didn't need to hear that notion twice to like it. He hadn't been able to chase the Videssians in all his campaigning through the land of the Thousand Cities. He'd put himself where they would be a couple times, and he'd lured them into coming to him, too. But to go after them, knowing he could catch them «Aye,» he said. «Let's.»
Maniakes very quickly made it clear that he did not intend to be brought to bay. He went back to the old routine of wrecking canals and levees behind him to slow the Makuraner pursuit. Even with that, though, not all was as it had been before Romezan had come to the land of the Thousand Cities. The Videssians did not enjoy the luxury of leisure to destroy cities. They had to content themselves with burning crops and riding through fields to trample down grain: wreckage, yes, but of a lesser sort.
Abivard wrote a letter to Sharbaraz, announcing his victory over Maniakes. Romezan also wrote one with Abivard looking over his shoulder as he drafted it and offering helpful suggestions. It apologized for disobeying the orders he'd gotten from the King of Kings and promised that if forgiven, he'd never again make such a heinous blunder. After reading it, Abivard felt as if he'd eaten too much fruit that had been too sweet to begin with and then had been candied in honey.
Romezan shook his head as he stamped his signet—a wild boar with great tushes—into the hot wax holding the letter closed. «If someone sent me a letter like this, I'd throw up.»
«So would I,» Abivard said. «But it's the sort of thing Sharbaraz likes to get. We've both seen that: tell the truth straight out and you're in trouble, load up your letter with this nonsense and you get what you want.»
The same courier carried both letters off toward the west, toward a Mashiz no longer in danger from the Videssian army, toward a King of Kings who was likely to care less about that than about his orders, no matter how foolish, being obeyed. Abivard wondered what sort of letter would come out of the west, out of the shadows of the Dilbat Mountains, out of the shadows of a court life only distantly connected to the real world.
He also wondered when he would hear that Tzikas had been put to death. When he did not hear of the renegade's premature– though not, to his way of thinking, untimely—demise, he wondered when he would hear of Tzikas' leading the rear guard against his own men.
That did not happen, either. The longer either of those things took to come about, the more unhappy he got. He'd handed Tzikas over to Maniakes in the confident expectation—which Maniakes had fostered—that the Avtokrator would put him to death. Now Maniakes was instead holding on to him: to Abivard it seemed unfair.
But he knew better than to complain. If the Avtokrator had managed to trick him, that was his own fault, no one else's. Maybe he'd get the chance to pay Maniakes back one day soon. And maybe he wouldn't have to rely on trickery. Maybe he'd run the Videssians to earth as if they were a herd of wild asses and ride them down. Amazing, the thoughts to which the arrival of a real cavalry force could give rise.
Sharbaraz King of Kings did not delay in replying to the letters he'd gotten from Abivard and Romezan. When Abivard received a messenger from the King of Kings, he did so with all the enthusiasm he would have shown going off to get a rotting tooth pulled from his head.
By the same token, the leather message tube the fellow handed him might as well have been a venomous serpent. He opened it, broke the seal on the parchment, and unrolled it with no small trepidation. As usual, Sharbaraz had made his scribe waste several lines with his titles, his accomplishments, and his hopes. He seemed
