on iron overtones, too. And hearing his words without seeing his lips was disconcerting; it was almost as if he were disembodied and reanimated by sorcerous arts. But all that paled before the possible import of his message. «I know that,» Maniakes repeated. «Are you telling me you've caught the son of a whore?»
«No, Majesty. But one of the patrols sent out by Abivard King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase—» Though Abivard did not yet claim the Makuraner royal title, this soldier was doing it for him. «—did run down a confederate of his. The wretch now stands before the God for consignment to the Void.» «That's good news, though not so good as I would have hoped,» Maniakes said.
«Wait,» Rhegorios put in. «This patrol caught only one of the men who went west with Tzikas?» «Just so, lord,» the Makuraner messenger replied.
Maniakes saw the import there as readily as his cousin. «They've split up to make it harder for your men to catch them,» he said, «and easier for them to get the word through to Sharbaraz. That is not good.» Tzikas had a way of making his life—and evidently Abivard's life, too—difficult.
«Abivard judges this in the same way,» the Makuraner said. «His view is that he will reckon himself rid of Tzikas for good when he sees the traitor's head on a pole—provided it does not answer when he speaks.»
«Mm, yes,» Maniakes said. «If anyone could bring that off, Tzikas is the man. Your task is the same, either way, though: whether or not Tzikas gets to Mashiz ahead of you, you still have to beat Sharbaraz.»
«This is also true, Majesty,» the messenger agreed. «But I can swim the Tutub naked, or I can swim it, or try to swim it, in my corselet here. Swimming it naked is easier, as taking Sharbaraz unawares is also easier.»
Now Maniakes nodded, yielding the point. «The faster Abivard moves, then, the better his chances of doing that.»
«Again I think you speak the truth,» the Makuraner said. «The bulk of his army has already headed west.» He waved back to his comrades. «We are a guard of honor for your men—and a force that can harm you if you go against the agreement you have made. You are Videssians, after all.»
«We are your comrades in this, since it works for our good as well as yours,» Maniakes said.
The Makuraner nodded; that was logic he could understand. «And we are your comrades. Know, comrade, that we shall always watch you to make sure we stay friends and you do not try to move into a position where you can harm us.»
Maniakes smiled at him, none too sweetly. «Even after you drove our armies out of the westlands, we've always watched you. We'll keep on doing it. And tell Abivard for me that I am not the one who has harmed him and I am not the one who intends to harm him.»
«I shall deliver your words, just as you say them.» The Makuraner rode back toward the force of heavy cavalry waiting for him.
Lysia sighed. «I wish we could come to trust each other.»
«We've come further now than we ever did before,» Maniakes answered. «If I had to guess, I'd say we've come about as far as we can. Abivard is welcome to keep an eye on me, I'll keep an eye on him, and maybe we can stretch two generations of peace out of that instead of one. Worth hoping for, anyhow.» In earnest of that hope, he sketched the sun-circle over his heart.
Close by Across, the countryside had been fought over several times, and looked it. Many little farming villages were nothing but charred ruins, many fields full of nothing but weeds because the peasants who should have worked them were dead or fled. Seeing the wreckage of what had been prosperous farmland saddened Maniakes without surprising him.
What did surprise him was how normal things seemed as soon as his army moved away from areas war had ravaged. The Videssian force traveled behind and a bit north of Abivard's army; had it followed directly in back of the Makuraners, it would have found the land largely eaten bare before it arrived.
As things were, the quartermasters attached to the Videssian army had a harder time keeping it fed than they'd expected. «The cursed peasants get word we're on the way, your Majesty,» one of them said indignantly, «and they light out for the nearest hills they can find. And what's worse, they lead all their livestock with them and bury their grain in the ground in jars. How are we supposed to find it then?»
«Magic?» Maniakes suggested.
The quartermaster shook his head. «We've tried it, your Majesty. It does no good. Passion is magic's foe. When the peasants hide their food, they aren't thinking kind thoughts about the people from whom they're hiding it—» «I wonder why that is,» Maniakes said.
«I don't know,» the quartermaster answered, showing he was better suited to counting sacks of beans than to understanding the people who grew them. «The net result, though, is that we haven't got as much as I wish we did.»
«Have we got enough?» Maniakes asked. «Oh, aye, a sufficiency,» the quartermaster sniffed, «but we should do better than that.» Even in matters of supply, he wanted to turn a profit.
«A sufficiency will, uh, suffice,» Maniakes said. «After all, if everything goes as we want, after this campaign—which isn't even a fighting campaign, at that—we'll have the westlands back. If we can't get a surplus with the whole Empire restored, that will be time enough for worry.» The quartermaster's nod was reluctant, but it was a nod.
Everything went smoothly till the army came to Patrodoton, a good-sized village a couple of days' ride east of the Eriza, a south-flowing tributary of the Arandos, the biggest river in the westlands. Patrodoton, though not large enough to boast a city wall, had hosted a Makuraner garrison, a couple of dozen men who'd made sure the local peasants gave a share of their crops and animals, and the handful of local merchants a share of their money, to support the Makuraner occupation.
Getting the garrison to leave Patrodoton was not the problem. The Makuraners had already pulled out by the time Maniakes' outriders neared the village. Three of the occupiers had married Videssian women, apparently intending to settle down in the area for good. Two of those brides headed back toward Makuran with their husbands, and the father of one of them left with the garrison, too. That was the start of the problem, right there.
The village ypepoptes, or headman, was a gray-bearded miller named Gesios. After performing a proskynesis before Maniakes, he said, «It's a good thing you're here, your Majesty, to settle all the treason that's gone on in this town while the heathen Makuraners were running things. If Optatos hadn't run off with Optila and the heathen she gave herself to, I expect you'd already have shortened him by a head. He was the worst, I reckon, but he's a long way from the only one.»
«Wait.» Maniakes held up a warning hand. «I tell you right now, a lot of this I don't and won't want to hear about. Once the westlands are in our hands again, we're all going to have to live with one another. If someone turned his neighbors over to the Makuraners to be killed, that's treason, and I'll listen to it. If people went on quietly living their lives, I'm going to let them keep on doing it. Have you got that?»
«Aye, your Majesty.» Gesios sounded more than disappointed. He sounded angry. «What about the priest, then? These past years, Oursos has been preaching the worst nonsense you ever did hear, about Vaspur the Firstborn and all sorts of heresy, enough to make your beard curl. Boiler boys made him do it.»
Maniakes didn't bother mentioning that his own father still clung to the Vaspurakaner beliefs that Makuraners had tried to impose on Videssos. What he did say was, «Now that the boiler boys are gone, will the holy Oursos return to the orthodox faith? If he will, no one will punish him for what he preached under duress.»
«Oh, he will,» Gesios said. «He's already done it, matter of fact. Thing of it is, though, he's been preaching the other way for so long now, about one in four has decided it's the right way to believe.»
You could plunge a burning torch into a bucket of water. That would put out the fire. What it wouldn't do was restore the torch to the way it had been before the fire touched it. And having the Makuraners pull out of the westlands would not restore them to what they had been, either. They'd been tormented for years. They Wouldn't heal overnight.
«Have the holy Oursos talk with them,» the Avtokrator said with as much patience as he could find. «The good god willing, he'll bring them back to orthodoxy in a while. And if he doesn't—well, that's something to worry about later. Right now, I've got more to worry about than I can hope to handle, and as for later—» He laughed, though he didn't think Gesios saw the joke.
Not only he, but also Rhegorios and nearly every other officer above the level of troop leader, was bombarded with claims from the locals while the army spent the night outside Patrodoton. The officers dismissed a
