Videssos Besieged

«Isn't that the most peculiar excuse for a shrine you ever saw, your Majesty?» Komentiolos said. «There's a chamber back there with a lot of metal drums and stones, to make it sound like the statue of the God is thundering at whatever he's taken a mind to disliking.»

«It's not a statue of the God, or not exactly a statue of the God,» Maniakes answered. «What it is, exactly, is a statue of Sharbaraz King of Kings.»

For a moment, Komentiolos didn't understand. Then he did, and looked as sickened as Maniakes felt. «It's a statue of Sharbaraz King of Kings as the God,» he said, as if hoping Maniakes would tell him he was wrong.

However much Maniakes wished he could do that, he couldn't. «That's just what it is,» he said.

«But don't the Makuraners—» Komentiolos spread his hands in helpless disbelief. «—don't they think this is blasphemy, too?»

«I don't know. I hope so,» Maniakes told him. «But I do know one thing: Sharbaraz doesn't think it's blasphemy.»

Back when he'd known Sharbaraz, more than a decade before, the King of Kings—or, as he was then, the claimant to the title of King of Kings—would never have had such a building erected. But Sharbaraz-then was not Sharbaraz-now. Through all the intervening years, he'd been unchallenged sovereign of Makuran. Everyone had sought his favor. No one had disagreed with him. The result was… this.

Sketching the sun-circle over his heart, Maniakes murmured, «It could have been me.» The sycophancy in the court of Videssos was hardly less than that in the court of Makuran. Thanks to his father, Maniakes had taken with a grain of salt all the flattery he'd heard. Sharbaraz, evidently, had lapped it up and gone looking for more.

Komentiolos said, «Now that we've got this place, your Majesty, what do we do with it?»

«I wish I'd never seen it in the first place,» Maniakes said. But that was not an answer. He found something that was: «We bring some Makuraner prisoners in here, so they can see it with their own eyes. Then we let them go, to spread the tale as they will. After that, we let some of our soldiers see it, too, to give them the idea of what sort of enemy we're fighting. Then we let them wreck the statue. Then we let them wreck the building. Then we burn it. Fire purifies.»

«Aye, your Majesty. I'll see to all of that,» Komentiolos said. «It sounds good to me.»

None of it sounds good to me,» Maniakes said. «I wish we weren't doing it. I wish we didn't have to do it. By the good god, I wish this shrine had never been built.»

He wondered how Abivard, who had always fought him as one soldier against another, no more, no less, could bear to serve under a man who was coming to believe himself on a par with his god. He wondered whether Abivard knew this place existed and, if so, what he thought of it. He filed that last question away, as possibly worth exploring later.

First things first. «Gather up the prisoners and send them through here, quick as you can. Then turn our men loose on this place. The longer it stands, the greater the abomination.»

«You're right about that, your Majesty,» Komentiolos said. «I'll see to it, I promise you.»

«Good.» Maniakes tried to imagine portraying himself as Phos incarnate on earth. Absurd. If the good god didn't strike him down, his outraged subjects would. He hurried out of the shrine, feeling a sudden need for fresh, clean air.

Maniakes looked back toward the southeast, toward Lyssaion. He couldn't see the Videssian port now, of course. He couldn't even see the hills that were the watershed between the Xeremos and the Tutub. The only hillocks making the horizon anything but flat were the artificial ones upon which perched the Thousand Cities.

His chuckle was sheepish. Turning to Lysia, he said, «When I'm back in Videssos the city, I can't wait to get away. Once I am away, I wish I had news of what's going on there.»

«I don't miss the city,» Lysia said. «We haven't heard much from it the past couple of summers, and what news they did bring us here wasn't worth having.»

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.»