Bagdasares proceeded briskly to work. He filled a bowl with dirt he dug up from close by where he was standing—'What better symbol for the local land than the local land?» He made a channel in it, and poured in water from the pitcher that rested by his bedroll—'How else to represent the water of the Tib than by the water of the Tib?»
The landscape created, he used little twigs and chips of wood to symbolize the bridge of boats that would soon stretch across the river. «You want to know whether some flood is impending, not so?» «That's right,» Maniakes said.
«Very well, then,» the wizard answered, more than a little absently: he was already gathering himself for the spell proper. He began to chant and make passes over the bowl. «Reveal!» he cried in Videssian, and then again in the Vaspurakaner tongue Maniakes had trouble following.
The Avtokrator wondered if Makuraner mages were trying to interfere with Bagdasares' conjuration. He would not have been surprised to learn they were; knowing whether he could cross the Tib in safety was obviously important to him, and the magical method for determining the truth not too complex.
But Alvinos Bagdasares gave him a straight answer. The Avtokrator watched the bridge extend itself toward the western bank of the model of the Tib, then saw little ghostly, glowing specks spring into being and cross the symbolic river from east to west.
«Weather shall not hamper us, your Majesty,» Bagdasares murmured.
«I see that,» Maniakes answered, still looking down into the bowl. And, as he had at his friend's earlier attempt to learn what lay ahead, he saw more than he had bargained for. Those ghostly specks suddenly recrossed the Tib, this time from west to east. «What does that mean?» he asked Bagdasares.
This time, the mage had seen for himself what had happened, instead of needing to rely on his sovereign's description. «At a guess—and a guess is all it is—we are not destined to stay long in Mashiz, if indeed we succeed in reaching the seat of the King of Kings.»
«That was my guess, too,» Maniakes said. «I was hoping yours would be more palatable.»
«I'm sorry, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. «I do not know for a fact that what I say here is true, mind you, but all other interpretations strike me as less probable than the one I offered.»
«They strike me the same way,» Maniakes said. «As I say, I'm just wishing they didn't.» He brightened. «Maybe the magic Means Sharbaraz will be so frightened after we cross the Tib, he'll Make peace on our terms. If he does that, we won't have to stay west of the river long.»
«It could be so,» Bagdasares answered. «Trying by magic to learn what the King of Kings might do is hopeless, or as near as makes no difference, he being warded against such snoopery as you are. But nothing in the spell I have cast contradicts the meaning you offer.»
Nothing in the spell contradicted it, perhaps, but Maniakes had trouble believing it even though it came from his own mouth. The trouble was, however much he wanted to think it likely, it went dead against everything he knew, or thought he knew, of Sharbaraz's character. The next sign of flexibility the Makuraner King of Kings displayed would be the first. The envoy he had sent to negotiate with Maniakes had been sent not to make peace but to delay the Videssians till that army of foot soldiers could fall on them. Which meant…
«Something's going to go wrong,» Maniakes said. «I have no idea what, I have no idea why, but something is going to go wrong.»
He watched Bagdasares. The Vaspurakaner mage had been a courtier for a good many years now, and plainly wanted to tell him nothing could possibly go wrong with the plans of the ever-victorious Videssian army. The only trouble was, Bagdasares couldn't do that. Both he and Maniakes had seen plans go wrong before, had seen that the Videssian army was a long way from ever-victorious. Flattery worked a lot better when both sides were willing to ignore small details like truth. «Perhaps it won't go totally wrong,» Bagdasares said.
«Aye, perhaps it won't,» Maniakes said. In an unsafe, imperfect world, sometimes that was as much as you could reasonably expect. He held up one finger. «No one save the two of us need know of this conjuration.» Bagdasares nodded. Maniakes figured he would tell Lysia, who could be relied upon not to blab. But if the army didn't know, maybe what the magic foretold would somehow fail to come true for them. Maniakes let out a silent sigh. He had trouble believing that, too.
Engineers ran planks and chains from one boat to the next. One piece at a time, the bridge they were building advanced across the Tib. Ypsilantes glanced over at Maniakes and remarked, «It's all going very well.»
«So it is,» the Avtokrator answered. He hadn't told Ypsilantes anything about the conjuration except that it showed the bridge could advance without fear of flooding. Too late, it occurred to him that too much silence might well have made the chief engineer draw his own conclusions, and that the conclusions were liable to be right. Whether Ypsilantes had his own conclusions or not, he carried out the orders Maniakes gave him.
Foot soldiers were drawn up on the west bank of the Tib to harass the engineers and, Maniakes supposed, to resist the Videssians if that harassment failed. Thanks to magic, Maniakes knew it would. The Makuraners, being more ignorant, kept trying to make nuisances of themselves.
They did a fair job of it, too, wounding several Videssian engineers once the end of the bridge moved into archery range. Not too troubled, Ypsilantes sent forward men with big, heavy shields: the same shields, in fact, that had protected the barricade-clearing engineers in the sheds in the recent battle with the Makuraners. Behind those shields, the bridge builders kept working. Surgeons tended the injured men, none of whom was hurt badly enough to need a healer-priest.
Maniakes remembered Abivard's story about the Makuraners' building a bridge across the Degird River so they could cross it and attack the Khamorth out on the Pardrayan steppe. The Makuraner expedition had come to grief: indeed, to disaster, with Peroz King of Kings dying there on the plains. The Avtokrator hoped his own luck would be better than that. He had no way of knowing whether he would become one of the little points of light Bagdasares' magic had shown recrossing the Tib.
After a while, Ypsilantes also sent archers out to the end of the bridge to shoot back at the Makuraners. The enemy, though, had more men on the bank than the chief engineer could place at the end of the bridge. Seeing that, he sent out boatloads of archers, too, and a couple of rafts with dart-throwers mounted on them. They pumped enough missiles into the unarmored Makuraner infantry, those from the dart-throwers beyond the range at which it could respond, to sow a good deal of confusion in the foot soldiers' ranks.
«Here, let's do this,» Maniakes said, calling Ypsilantes over to him. The chief engineer grinned a nasty grin after they were done speaking together.
Those boats with archers in them began going rather farther up and down the Tib, and making as if to land. That got the Makuraners running this way and that. A couple of boats did land Videssian bowmen, who stayed on the west bank of the Tib long enough to shoot a volley or two at the Makuraners, then reembarked and rowed back out onto the river.
Meanwhile, the engineers kept extending the bridge of boats till it got quite close to the western bank of the Tib. Watching their Progress, Maniakes said to Rhegorios, «This is when I wouldn't mind having some Makuraner-style heavy cavalry of my own. I could send them charging over the bridge and scatter that infantry like this.» He snapped his fingers.
Rhegorios said, «I think the horsemen we have will be plenty to do the job.»
«I think you're right,» Maniakes said. Bagdasares' magic went a long way toward persuading him his cousin was right. How much good his being right would do in the end was a different question, one Maniakes didn't want to think about. Sometimes acting was easier than thinking. He assembled a force of horsemen with javelins near the eastern edge of the bridge, ready to move when the time came.
It came that afternoon: one of the engineers repotted, «Your Majesty, the water under the bridge is only three or four feet deep now.»
«Then we're going to go.» Maniakes shouted orders to the trumpeters. Their horn calls sent the horsemen thundering down the bridge toward the Makuraner foot soldiers. It also sent the Videssian engineers and shieldmen leaping off the bridge into the warm, muddy waters of the Tib.
He'd succeeded in surprising the Makuraners and their commander. The horses splashed down into the water, then, urged on by their riders, hurried toward the foe. Some of the cavalrymen flung their javelins at the infantry awaiting them, while others imitated the Makuraner boiler boys and used the light spears as if they were lances.
The Videssians gained the riverbank and began to push the foremost Makuraners back. That threw the
