Videssos Besieged

Harry Turtledove – Videssos Besieged

I

Outside the imperial residence in Videssos the city, the cherry trees were in bloom. Soon their pink and white petals would drift the ground and walks around the residence in much the same way as the snow had done till a few weeks earlier.

Maniakes threw wide the shutters and peered out at the grove that made the residence the only place in the palace quarter where the Avtokrator of the Videssians could find even a semblance of privacy. One of the many bees buzzing by made as if to land on him. He drew back in a hurry. When spring came, the bees were a nuisance: they were, in fact, almost the only thing he disliked about spring.

«Phos be praised,» he said, sketching the good god's sun-circle above his heart, «now that good sailing weather is here again, we can get out of the city and fight another round with the men of Makuran.» He made a sour face. «I know the Makuraners are my enemies. Here in the capital, foes come disguised, so they're harder to spot.»

«Once we've beaten the Makuraners, things will go better here,» said his wife, Lysia. She came over and took his hand and also looked at the flowering cherry trees. When another bee tried to fly into the chamber, she snatched up a sheet of parchment from Maniakes' desk and used it to chivvy the bee back outside. Then she smiled at him. «There. That's more use than we usually get out of tax registers.»

«How right you are,» he said fondly. Lysia had a gift for not taking the ponderous Videssian bureaucratic machine too seriously, while to the army of tax collectors and clerks and scribes and Account reckoners it was not only as important as life itself but was in fact life itself. Better yet, she helped Maniakes not take the bureaucracy too seriously, either, a gift he often thought beyond price.

He hugged her. The two of them were not very far apart in height They were a little stockier, a little swarthier than the Videssian norm, being of Vaspurakaner blood even if almost completely Videssian in the way they thought Both had lustrous, almost blue-black hair, bushy eyebrows—though Lysia plucked hers to conform to imperial standards of beauty—and high-arched, prominent noses. Maniakes' thick, heavy beard covered his cheeks and chin, but under the beard that chin, he suspected, was a match for Lysia's strong one.

Their resemblance was no mere accident of having sprung from the same homeland, nor was it a case of husband and wife coming to look like each other over the course of living together—such cases being more often joked about than seen. They were not just husband and wife; they were also first cousins—Lysia's father, Symvatios, was younger brother to Maniakes' father, with whom the Avtokrator shared his name.

Lysia said, «When we sail for the west to fight the Makuraners, have you decided whether to use the northern or southern route?»

«The southern, I think,» Maniakes answered. «If we land in the north, we have to thread our way through all the valleys and passes of the Erzerum Mountains. That's the longer way to have to go to aim for Mashiz, too. I want Sharbaraz—» He pronounced it Sarbaraz; like most who spoke Videssian, he had trouble with the sh sound, though he could sometimes bring it out. «—King of Kings to be sweating in his capital the way I've sweated here in the city.»

«He's had to worry more than we have, the past couple of years,» Lysia said. «The Cattle Crossing holds the Makuraners away from Videssos the city, but the Tutub and the Tib are only rivers. If we can beat the soldiers the Makuraners put up against us, we will sack Mashiz.»

She sounded confident. Maniakes felt confident. «We should have done it last year,» he said. «I never expected them to be able to hold us when we were moving down the Tib.» He shrugged. «That's why you have to fight the war, though: to see which of the things you don't expect come true.»

«We hurt them even so,» Lysia said. She spoke consolingly, but what she said was true. Maniakes nodded. «I'd say the Thousand Cities between the Tutub and the Tib are down to about eight hundred, thanks to us.» He knew he was exaggerating the destruction the Videssians had wrought, but he didn't think there really were a thousand cities on the flood-plain, either. «Not only do we hurt the Makuraners doing that, but we loosen their hold on the westlands of Videssos, too.»

«This is a strange war,» Lysia observed.

Maniakes nodded again. Makuran held virtually all of the Videssian westlands, the great peninsula on the far side of the Cattle Crossing. All his efforts to drive them out of the westlands by going straight at them had failed. But Makuran, a landlocked power till its invasion of Videssos, had no ships to speak of. Controlling the sea had let Maniakes strike at the enemy's heartland even if he couldn't free his own.

He slipped an arm around Lysia's waist. «You're falling down on the job, you know.» She raised an eyebrow in a silent question. He explained: «The last two years, you've had a baby while we were on campaign in the Land of the Thousand Cities.»

She laughed so hard, she pulled free of him. He stared at her in some surprise; he hadn't thought the small joke anywhere near that fa

«Do you?» he said. Now Lysia nodded. He hugged her, shaking his head all the while. «I think we're going to have to make the imperial residence bigger, with all the children it will be holding.»

«I think you may be right,» Lysia answered. Maniakes had a young daughter and son, Evtropia and Likarios, by his first wife, Niphone, who had died giving birth to Likarios. Lysia had borne him two boys, Symvatios and Tatoules. The one, a toddler now, was named for her father—Maniakes' uncle—the other for Maniakes' younger brother, who had been missing for years in the chaos that surrounded the Makuraner conquest of the westlands. Maniakes knew Tatoules almost had to be dead, and had chosen the name to remember him.

Maniakes also had a bastard son, Atalarikhos, back on the eastern island of Kalavria. His father had governed there before their clan rose up against the vicious and inept rule of the previous Avtokrator, Genesios, who had murdered his way to the throne and tried to stay on it with even more wholesale slaughter. Now Maniakes prudently mentioned neither Atalarikhos nor his mother, a yellow-haired Haloga woman named Rotrude, to Lysia.

Instead of bringing up such a sticky topic, he said, «Shall we hold a feast to celebrate the good news?»

To his surprise and disappointment, Lysia shook her head. «What would be the point? The clan stands by us, and your soldiers do, because you've managed to make the Makuraners thoughtful about fighting Videssians, but most of the nobles would find polite reasons to be someplace else.»

He scowled, his eyebrows coming down in a thick black line above his eyes. She was right, and he knew it, and he hated it «The patriarch gave us a dispensation,» he growled.

«So he did,» Lysia agreed, «after you almost sailed back to Kalavria three years ago. That frightened Agathios into it. But only about half the priests acknowledge it, and far fewer than half the nobles.»

«I know what will make everyone acknowledge it,» Maniakes said grimly. Lysia half turned away from him, as if to say nothing would make people acknowledge the legitimacy of their union. But he found a magic word, one as potent as if spoken by a chorus of the most powerful mages from the Sorcerers' Collegium: «Victory.»

Maniakes rode through the streets of Videssos the city toward the harbor of Kontoskalion on the southern side of the capital. Before him marched a dozen parasol-bearers, their bright silk canopies a