She spoke with great certainty, and with more than a little anger in her voice. The mockery and disapproval she'd taken in the capital for becoming her cousin's consort wore more heavily on her than they did on Maniakes. He'd already seen that, as Avtokrator, nothing he did was going to make everybody happy. That let him take scorn philosophically… most of the time.
«Not easy to get messengers through, anyway,» he said, as if consoling himself. «Not hearing doesn't have to mean anything. They wouldn't send out dispatches unless the news was important enough to risk losing men to make sure it got to me.»
«To the ice with news, except what we cause,» Lysia said positively. «To the ice with Videssos the city, too. I'd give it to the Makuraners in a minute if doing that wouldn't wreck the Empire.»
Yes, she'd let her resentment fester where Maniakes had shrugged– most of—his off.
He stopped worrying about news from home and looked west instead. The horizon was jagged there, with the peaks of the Dilbat Mountains shouldering themselves up into view above the nearer flatlands. In the foothills of those mountains lay Mashiz. He'd been there once, years before, helping to install Sharbaraz on his throne. If he reached Mashiz again, he'd cast Sharbaraz down from that throne… and from his assumption of divinity. Destroying that shrine was something Maniakes had been delighted to do.
Closer than the Dilbats, closer than Mashiz, was the Tib. Canals stretched its waters out to the west. Where the canals failed, as at the eastern margins of the Tutub, irrigation failed. Irrigation, though, was only marginally in his mind now. He concentrated on getting over the river. It wasn't so wide as the Tutub, but ran swifter, and was no doubt still in spring spate. Crossing it wouldn't be easy; the Makuraners would do everything they could to keep him from gaining the western bank.
He didn't expect to capture a bridge of boats intact; that would be luck beyond any calculation. Whatever soldiers the foe had on the far side would mass against him. If they delayed him long enough, as they might well, the Makuraner infantry army he'd left behind would catch up to him. With so many soldiers mustered against his men, with the river limiting the directions in which he could move, all that might prove unpleasant.
When he grumbled about the difficulties of getting over the Tib, Rhegorios said, «If we have to, you know, we can always turn south toward the source of the river and either ford it where it's young and narrow or go round it altogether and come up along the west bank.»
«I don't want to do anything like that,» Maniakes said. «It would take too long. I want to go straight at Mashiz.»
His cousin looked at him without saying anything. Maniakes felt his cheeks grow hot. In the early days of his reign, his most besetting fault had been moving too soon, committing himself to action without adequate preparation or resources. Rhegorios thought he was doing it again.
On reflection, though, he decided he wasn't. «Think it through,» he said. «If we turn south, what will the fellow in charge of the foot soldiers from Qostabash do? Is he likely to chase us? Can he hope to catch us, foot pursuing horse? If he has any sense, what he'll do is cross the Tib himself and wait for us at the approaches to Mashiz. If you were in his sandals, isn't that what you'd do?»
Rhegorios did think it through, quite visibly. Maniakes gave him credit for that, the more so as his young cousin was inclined to be headstrong, too. «Cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, I think you're likely to be right,» the Sevastos said at last. «Revolting how doing something simple will spill the chamber pot into the soup of a complicated plan.»
«We have to find a way to get across ourselves, once we do reach the river,» Maniakes said. «The trouble is, if the defenders are even half awake, that's almost as hard a job as getting over the Cattle Crossing has been for the Makuraners. They've been trying to figure out how to manage that for years, and they haven't come close yet, Phos be praised.»
«I know what you need to do,» Rhegorios said suddenly. «Have Bagdasares turn the whole Tib into a Voimios strap and flip it about so that all at once we're on the west side and the cursed Makuraners are on the east.»
Maniakes laughed out loud. «You don't think small, do you, cousin of mine? Except for the detail that that sounds like a magic big enough to burn out the brain of every wizard in Videssos, it's a splendid notion.»
«I thought you'd like it,» Rhegorios said. Now both men laughed. Rhegorios went on, «If you've got a better idea, I'd like to hear it.»
«What I'd like to do,» Maniakes said, «is play a trick on them like the one my father used against Smerdis' men when we were fighting alongside Sharbaraz. My father made a big, fancy, obvious move to cross a waterway —pinned the enemy's attention to it nice as you please. Then he put a force across downstream from his feint, just far enough that nobody noticed them till they were too well established to be checked.»
«That sounds good,» Rhegorios agreed. «How do we bring it off?»
«We're short of rafts, and this country doesn't have enough trees to make building them easy,» Maniakes said. «Maybe we can try using the hide boats the locals make.»
«You mean the round ones that look like soup bowls?» Rhegorios rolled his eyes. «To the ice with me if I'd be happy getting into one of those. I can't see how the people who use them keep them from spinning round and round and round. Or were you talking about the rafts that float on top of blown-up hides so they'll carry more? If those are the kinds of ideas the Makuraners get when they think of boats, it's no wonder they never tried coming over the Cattle Crossing.»
«The locals aren't Makuraners,» Maniakes reminded him. «And take a look around, cousin of mine. They do what they can with what they have: not much wood, not much of anything but mud. You can't make a boat out of mud, but you can raise beasts on what grows out of the mud and then use their hides to go up and down the rivers and canals.»
«Do you really want to try putting our men into those crazy things to get to the west bank of the Tib?» Rhegorios said. «Even more to the point, do you think you can get horses into them? Men are stupid; if you order them to go and do something, they'll go and do it, even if they can see it's going to get a raft of them—» He used the term with obvious relish. «—killed. Horses, now, horses have better sense than that.»
Like his cousin, Maniakes knew horses all too often showed lamentably little sense of any sort. That, however, wasn't relevant. Rhegorios' objection was. Maniakes said, «Maybe you're right. But if you are, how do you propose getting over the river?»
«Who, me? You're the Avtokrator; you're supposed to be the one with all the answers,» Rhegorios said, which was highly annoying and true at the same time.
«One of the answers the Avtokrator is allowed to use is picking someone who knows more about a particular bit of business than he does and then listening to what he has to say,» Maniakes returned.
«If you want to talk about the business of chasing pretty girls, I know more than you do,» Rhegorios said. «If you want to talk about the business of guzzling neat wine, I know more than you do. If you want to talk about the business of leading a cavalry column, I know at least as much as you do. If you want to talk about the business of crossing a river without bridging or proper boats, neither one of us knows a bloody thing.»
«You certainly made noises as if you knew,» Maniakes said.
«If you want to talk about the business of making noises, I know more than you do,» Rhegorios said, impudent as usual.
«I know what I'll do.» Maniakes thumped himself in the forehead with the heel of the hand to show he'd been stupid. «I'd have had to do it when we got to the Tib any which way. I'll talk with Ypsilantes.»
For the first time in their conversation, he discovered he had Rhegorios' complete and ungrudging approval. «That's a good idea,» Rhegorios said. «If the chief engineer can't figure out a way to do it, it can't be done. If you want to talk about the business of having good ideas, you may know more than I do.»
Being praised for an idea as obvious as it was good did not make Maniakes feel much better; the thought that it hadn't occurred to Rhegorios, either, consoled him to some degree. He wasted no time in summoning Ypsilantes. The chief engineer was nearer his father's age than his own; he had commanded the engineering detachment accompanying the Videssian army the elder Maniakes had led in alliance with Sharbaraz and against Smerdis.
«How do we get across the river?» he repeated when Maniakes put the question to him. His handsome, fleshy features did not show much of the amusement he obviously felt. «Your Majesty, you leave that to me. Tell me when and where you want to go across and I'll take care of it for you.»
He sounded as confident as if he were discussing his faith in Phos. That made Maniakes feel better; he'd
