sounded nervous.
The Videssian army exercised on the meadow near the southern end of the city wall. The soldiers rode and hurled javelins and shot arrows from horseback into bales of straw with more enthusiasm than Maniakes had ever known them to show. Immodios said, «They didn't care for being cooped up in the siege, your Majesty. They want to be out and doing.»
«So I see,» the Avtokrator said. «They would have been doing in Mashiz, if only Sharbaraz hadn't turned out to be more clever than we thought.» Rhegorios' comment went through his mind. Resolutely, he ignored it. If Genesios hadn't overthrown Likinios, Sharbaraz would have been a good enough neighbor to the Empire of Videssos. Since no one was going to overthrow him… He laughed, though it wasn't very funny. He knew how lucky he was to remain on his own throne.
Immodios said, «We won't have quite the numbers the boiler boys do, once we go over into the westlands.»
«I know we won't,» Maniakes answered. «Their army will get bigger as they go, too, because they'll be adding garrison troops to it. But that'll make them slow, less likely to up and strike at us: not that they aren't already aimed at Sharbaraz. And besides, I expect we'll recruit a few men of our own once we get over there.»
«Oh, aye, no doubt,» Immodios said, «men who used to be Videssian soldiers, but who've been making their living as bandits and robbers while the Makuraners held the westlands. The ones who can recall what they used to be will be worth having. The others—»
«The others will end up short a hand, or maybe a head,» Maniakes broke in. «That will be what they deserve, and it'll help the better ones remember what they're supposed to be.»
He put his horse through its paces. Antelope was glad to run, glad to rear and lash out with iron-shod hooves, glad to halt and stand steady as a rock while Maniakes shot half a quiver of arrows into a hay-bale target. Since other riders gave way for Maniakes, Antelope was convinced their horses gave way for him. For all Maniakes knew, they did.
Maniakes enjoyed putting himself through his paces, too. As long as he was up on Antelope, using his body as he'd been trained to do from as far back as his memory reached, he didn't have to think about how best to shepherd the Makuraners out of the westlands. He didn't have to remember the scorn so much of the city mob and so much of the ecclesiastical hierarchy felt for him. He didn't have to do any thinking, and he didn't. His body did what needed doing without his worrying about it.
He came back to himself some while later, returning to awareness when Antelope started breathing hard. His next conscious thought was startlement at how far the sun had moved across the sky. «Been at it for a bit,» he remarked to Immodios.
«Yes, your Majesty, you have.» Immodios was a sobersides, and sounded full of somber approval. If he reckoned anything more important than readying himself for war, Maniakes didn't know what it was.
Having stopped, the Avtokrator realized how tired he was. «I'll be stiff and sore tomorrow, too,» he grumbled, «even if it's not from being thrown all over the landscape. I don't do this often enough to stay in the shape I should.» After a moment's reflection– thought, once back, would not be denied—he added, «I'm not so young as I used to be, either.» He was tempted to start exercising again, to drive that thought away. But no. The alternative to getting older was not getting older, which was worse.
Accompanied by a squad of guardsmen, Maniakes rode up to the Silver Gate and then back along Middle Street toward the palace quarter. The guards were there only to protect him. They took no special notice of the hot-wine sellers and the whores, the scribes and the thieves, the monks and the mendicants who filled the street But the crowds noticed them. They were the nearest thing to a parade Videssos the city had at the moment, which of itself made them worthy of attention.
A few people, safely anonymous among others, shouted obscenities at the Avtokrator. He ignored them. He'd had plenty of practice ignoring them. Several men in the blue robes of the priesthood turned their backs on him, too. Agathios might have granted him his dispensation, but lacked the will for the ecclesiastical civil war enforcing it on the clergy would have required. Maniakes ignored the priests' contempt, too.
And then, to his astonishment, a blue-robe standing under a colonnade bowed to him as he rode past. Some priests did acknowledge Agathios' dispensation, but few till this moment had been willing to do so publicly. The Avtokrator waited for some outraged rigorist, layman or priest, to chuck a cobblestone at this fellow.
Nothing of the sort happened. Perhaps a furlong farther up Middle Street, someone shouted, «Good riddance to those Makuraner bastards, your Majesty!» The fellow waved to Maniakes.
He waved back. He'd always hoped success in war would bring him acceptance. Till recently, he hadn't had enough success in war to put the idea to the test. Maybe, earlier appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was true after all.
Someone yelled a lewd joke that suggested Lysia was his own daughter, not a cousin close to his own age. For a moment, he wanted to draw his sword and go after the ignorant loudmouth as fiercely as he'd practiced earlier in the day. But he surprised his bodyguards, and himself, too, by throwing back his head and laughing instead.
«You are well, your Majesty?» one of the Halogai asked. «By the good god, I am well,» he answered. «Some of them still hate me, aye, but most of those are fools. The ones who know what I've done know I haven't done too badly.» It was, he thought, the first time he'd not only said that but also believed it.
«How a man judges himself, this lies at the heart of things,» the northerner said with the certainty his people commonly showed. «A man who will let how others judge him turn how he judges himself—that is the man whose judgment is not to be trusted.»
«If only it were so easy,» Maniakes said with a sigh. The Haloga stared at him, pale eyes wide in perfect incomprehension. For him, it was that easy; to the Halogai, the world seemed a simple place. Maniakes saw it as much more complex than he could ever hope to understand. In that, even if not in blood, he was very much a Videssian.
The Haloga shrugged, visibly putting the matter out of his mind. Maniakes worried about it and worried at it all the way back to the imperial residence. There, he supposed, both he and his guardsman were true to the pictures they had built up of their world. But which of them was right? And how could you judge? He didn't know.
Videssian soldiers began filing out of merchantmen onto the beaches near Across. Sailors began persuading horses to leave barges and ships they'd persuaded the animals to board not long before. They'd had trouble getting the horses on; they had trouble getting them off. Curses, some hot as iron in a smith's forge but more resigned, floated into the morning sky.
Not far away, a detachment of Makuraner heavy cavalry stood waiting, watching. When Maniakes, Lysia on his arm and Rhegorios behind him, walked down the gangplank from the Renewal to the sandy soil of the westlands, the Makuraners swung up their lances in salute.
Rhegorios let out a soft whistle. «Here we are, landing in the westlands with the boiler boys watching,» he said in slow wonder.
«I never thought it would be like this,» Maniakes agreed.
«No,» Lysia said. «Otherwise, you would have made me stay in the Renewal till you'd beaten them back from where you landed.»
Was that resentment? Probably, Maniakes thought. He glanced over at his wife's bulging belly. «You wouldn't be at your best right now, not shooting the bow or flinging javelins from horseback,» he remarked.
«I suppose not,» Lysia admitted. In tones suggesting she was trying to be just, she went on, «You use that sort of excuse less than roost men, from all I've seen and heard. You don't leave me behind when you go on campaign.»
«I never wanted to leave you behind, going on campaign,» he answered.
A single Makuraner in full armor rode toward the Videssians. All Maniakes could see of his flesh were the palms of his hands, his eyes, and a small strip of forehead above those eyes. Iron and leather encased the rest of him, from gauntlets extending up over his fingers to a chain-mail veil protecting most of his face.
Coming up to Maniakes, he spoke in his own language: «Majesty, you know that Tzikas the traitor fled our encampment, accompanied by two others he suborned to treason.»
«Yes, I know that,» Maniakes answered. Emerging from behind that metal veil, the Makuraner's voice took
