The Thousand Cities

V

In early spring even the parched country between Mashiz and the westernmost tributaries of the Tib bore a thin carpet of green that put Abivard in mind of the hair on top of a balding man's head: you could see the bare land beneath, as you could see the bald man's scalp, and you knew it would soon prevail over the temporary covering.

For the first few farsangs out of the capital, though, such fine distinctions were the last thing on Abivard's mind, or his principal wife's, or those of their children. Breaming fresh air, seeing the horizon farther than a wall away-those were treasures beside which the riches in the storerooms of the King of Kings were pebbles and lumps of brass by comparison.

And happy as they were to escape their confinement, Pashang, their driver, was more joyful yet. They had been confined in genteel captivity: mewed up, certainly, but in comfort and with plenty to eat. Pashang had gone straight to the dungeons under the palace.

«The God only knows how far they go, lord,» he told Abivard as the wagon rattled along. «They're getting bigger all the time, too, for Sharbaraz has gangs of Videssian prisoners driving new tunnels through the rock. He uses 'em hard; when one dies, he just throws in another one. I was lucky they didn't put me in one of those gangs, or somebody else would be driving you now.»

«We took a lot of Videssian prisoners,» Abivard said in a troubled voice. «I'd hoped they were put to better use than that.»

Pashang shook his head. «Didn't look so to me, lord. Some of those poor buggers, they'd been down underground so long, they were pale as ghosts, and even the torchlight hurt their eyes. Some of 'em, they didn't even know Maniakes was Avtokrator in Videssos; they were trying to figure out what year of Genesios' reign they were in.»

«That's… alarming to think about,» Abivard said. «I'm glad you're all right, Pashang; I'm sorry I couldn't protect you as I would have liked.»

«What could you do, when you were in trouble yourself?» the driver answered. «It could have been worse for me, too. I know that. They just held me in a cell and didn't try to work me to death, till they finally let me out.» He glanced down at his hands. «First time in more years'n I can remember I don't have calluses from the reins. I'll blister, I suppose, then get 'em back.»

Abivard set a hand on his shoulder. «I'm glad you'll have the chance.»

The soldiers who had accompanied him to the capital now accompanied him away from it. Their fate had been milder than his and far milder than Pashang's. They'd been quartered apart from the rest of the troops in Mashiz, as if they carried some loath-some and contagious illness, and they'd been subjected to endless interrogations designed to prove that either they or Abivard was disloyal to the King of Kings. After that failed, they'd been left almost as severely alone as Abivard had.

One of them rode up to him as he was walking back to the wagon from a call of nature. The trooper said, «Lord, if we weren't angry at Sharbaraz before we got into Mashiz, we are now, by the God.»

He pretended he hadn't heard. For all he knew, the trooper was an agent of the King of Kings, trying to entrap him into a statement Sharbaraz could construe as treasonous. Abivard hated to think that way, but everything that had happened to him since he had been recalled from Vaspurakan warned him that he'd better.

When he came to Erekhatti, one of the westernmost of the Thousand Cities, he got his next jolt the sort of men Sharbaraz expected him to forge into an army with which to vanquish Maniakes. The city governor assembled the garrison for his inspection. «They are bold men,» the fellow declared. «They will fight like lions.»

What they looked like to Abivard was a crowd of tavern toughs or, at best, tavern bouncers: men who would probably be fierce enough facing foes smaller, weaker, and worse armed than themselves but who could be relied on to panic and flee under any serious attack. Though almost all of them wore iron pots on their heads, a good quarter were armed with nothing more lethal than stout truncheons.

Abivard pointed those men out to the city governor. «They may be fine for keeping order here inside the walls, but they won't be enough if we're fighting real soldiers-and we will be.»

«We have spears stored somewhere, I think,» the governor said doubtfully. After a moment he added, «Lord, garrison troops were never intended to go into battle outside the city walls, you know.»

So much for fighting like lions, Abivard thought. «If you know where those spears are, dig them up,» he commanded. «These soldiers will do better with them than without.»

«Aye, lord, just as you desire, so shall it be done,» the governor of Erekhatti promised. When Abivard was ready to move out the next morning with the garrison in tow, the spears had not appeared. He decided to wait till afternoon. There was still no sign of the spears. Angrily, he marched out of Erekhatti. The governor said, «I pray to the God I did not distress you.»

«As far as I'm concerned, Maniakes is welcome to this place,» Abivard snarled. That got him a hurt look by way of reply.

The next town to which he came was called Iskanshin. Its garrison was no more prepossessing than the one in Erekhatti-less so, in fact, for the city governor of Iskanshin had no idea where to lay his hands on the spears that might have turned his men from bravos into something at least arguably resembling soldiers.

«What am I going to do?» Abivard raved as he left Iskanshin.

«I've seen two cities now, and I have exactly as many men as I started out with, though three of those are down with a flux of the bowels and useless in a fight»

«It can't all be this bad,» Roshnani said.

«Why not?» he retorted.

«Two reasons,» she said. «For one, when we were forced through the Thousand Cities in the war against Smerdis, they defended themselves well enough to hold us out. And second, if they were all as weak as Erekhatti and Iskanshin, Videssos would have taken the land between the Tutub and the Tib away from us hundreds of years ago.»

Abivard chewed on that. It made some of his rage go away- some, but not all. «Then why aren't these towns in any condition to meet an attack now?» he demanded not so much of Roshnani as of the world at large.

The world didn't answer. The world, he'd found, never answered. His wife did: «Because Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, decided the Thousand Cities couldn't possibly be in any danger and so scanted them. And one of the reasons he decided the Thousand Cities were safe for all time was that a certain Abivard son of Godarz had won him a whole great string of victories against Videssos. How could the Videssians hope to trouble us after they'd been beaten again and again?»

«Do you know,» Abivard said thoughtfully, «that's not me answerless question it seems to be when you ask it that way. Maniakes has started playing the game by new rules. He's written off the westlands for the time being, which is something I never thought I'd see from an Avtokrator of the Videssians. But the way he's doing it makes a crazy kind of sense. If he can strike a blow at our heart and drive it home, whether we hold the westlands won't matter in the long run, because we'll have to give them up to defend ourselves.»

«He's never been foolish,» Roshnani said. «We've seen that over the years. If this is how he's fighting the war, it's because he thinks he can win.»

«Far be it from me to argue,» Abivard exclaimed. «By all I've seen here, I think he can win, too.»

But his pessimism was somewhat tempered by his reception at Harpar, just east of the Tib. The city governor there did not seem to regard his position as an invitation to indolence. On the contrary: Tovorg's garrison soldiers, while not the most fearsome men Abivard had ever seen, all carried swords and bows and looked to have some idea what to do with them. If they ever got near horsemen or in among them, they might do some damage, and they might not run in blind panic if enemy troopers moved toward them.

«My compliments, Excellency,» Abivard said. «Compared to what I've seen elsewhere, your warriors deserve to be recruited into the personal guard of the King of Kings.»

«You are generous beyond my deserts, lord,» Tovorg answered, cutting roast mutton with the dagger he wore on his belt. «I try only to do my duty to the realm.»

«Too many people are thinking of themselves first and only then of the realm,» Abivard said. «To them-note that I name no names-whatever is easiest is best.»

«You need name no names,» the city governor of Harpar said, a fierce gleam kindling in his eyes. «You come from Mashiz, and I know by which route. Other towns between the rivers are worse than those you have seen.»

«You do so ease my mind,» Abivard said, to which Tovorg responded with a grin that showed his long white teeth.

He said, «This was of course my first concern, lord.» Then he grew more serious. «How many peasants shall I rout out once you have moved on, and how much of the canal system do you think we'll have to destroy?»

«I hope it doesn't come to that, but get ready to rout out as many as you can. Destroying canals will hurt the cropland but not your ability to move grain to the storehouses-is that right?»

«There it might even help,» Tovorg said. «We mostly ship by water in these parts, so spreading water over the land won't hurt us much. What we eat next year is another question, though.»

«Next year may have to look out for itself,» Abivard answered.

«If Maniakes gets here, he'll wreck the canals as best he can instead of just opening them here and there to flood the land on either side of the banks. He'll burn the crops he doesn't flood, and he'll burn Harpar, too, if he can get over the walls or through them.»

«As we did in the Videssian westlands?» Tovorg shrugged. «The idea, then, is to make sure he doesn't come so far, eh?»

«Yes,» Abivard said, wondering as he spoke where he would find the wherewithal to stop Maniakes. Harpar's garrison was a start but no more. And they were infantry. Positioning them so they could block Maniakes' progress would be as hard as he'd warned Sharbaraz.

«I will do everything I can to work with you,» Tovorg said. «If the peasants grumble-if they try to do anything more than grumble-I will suppress them. The realm as a whole comes first»

«The realm comes first,» Abivard repeated. «You are a man of whom Makuran can be proud.» Tovorg hadn't asked about rewards. He hadn't made excuses. He'd just found out what needed doing and promised to do it. If things turned out well afterward, he undoubtedly hoped he would be remembered. And why not? A man was always entitled to hope.

Abivard hoped he would find more city governors like Tovorg.

«There!» A mounted scout pointed to a smoke cloud. «D'you see, lord?»

«Yes, I see it,» Abivard answered. «But so what? There are always clouds of smoke on the horizon in the Thousand Cities. More smoke here than I ever remember seeing before.»

That wasn't strictly true. He'd seen thicker, blacker smoke rising from Videssian cities when his troops had captured and torched them. But that smoke had lasted only until whatever was burnable inside those cities had burned itself out. Between the Tutub and the Tib smoke was a feet of life, rising from all the Thousand Cities as their inhabitants baked bread, cooked food, fired pots, smelted iron, and did all the countless other things requiring flame and fuel. One more patch of it struck Abivard as nothing out of the ordinary.

But the scout spoke with assurance: «There lies the camp of the Videssians, lord. No more than four or five farsangs from us.»

«I've heard prospects that delighted me more,» Abivard said. The scout showed white teeth in a grin of sympathetic understanding.

Abivard had known for some time the direction from which Maniakes was coming. Had the refugees fleeing before the Videssian Avtokrator been mute, their presence alone would have warned him of Maniakes' impending arrival, as a shift in the wind foretells a storm. But the refugees were anything but mute. They were in fact voluble and volubly insistent that Abivard throw back the invader.

«Easy to insist,» Abivard muttered. «Telling me how to do it is harder.»

The refugees had tried that, too. They'd bombarded him with plans and suggestions till he had tired of talking with them. They were convinced that they had the answers. If he'd had as many horsemen as there were people in all the Thousand Cities put together, the suggestions-or some of them-might have been good ones. Had he even had the mobile force he'd left behind in Vaspurakan, he might have been able to do something with a few of the half-bright schemes. As things were-

«As things are,» he said to no one in particular, «I'll be lucky if I don't get overrun and wiped out.» Then he called to Turan. The officer who had commanded his escort on the road from Vaspurakan down to Mashiz was now his lieutenant general, for he'd found no man from the garrison forces of the Thousand Cities whom he liked better for the role. He pointed to the smoke from Maniakes' camp, then asked, «What do you make of our chances against the Videssians?»

«With what we've got here?» Turan shook his head. «Not good. I hear the Videssians are better than they used to be, and even if they weren't, it wouldn't much matter. If they hit us a solid blow, we'll shatter. By any reasonable way of looking at things, we don't stand a chance.»

«Exactly what I was thinking,» Abivard said, «almost word for word. If we can't do anything reasonable to keep Maniakes from rolling over us, we'll just have to try something unreasonable.»

«Lord?» Turan stared in blank incomprehension. Abivard took that as a good sign. If his own lieutenant couldn't figure out what he had in mind, maybe Maniakes wouldn't be able to, either.

The night was cool only by comparison to the day that had just ended. Crickets chirped, sawing away like viol players who knew no tunes and had only one string. Somewhere off in the distance a fox yipped. Rather closer, the horses from Maniakes' army snorted and occasionally whickered on the picket lines where they were tied.

Stars blazed down from the velvety black dome of the sky. Abivard wished the moon were riding with them. Had he been able to see his way here, he wouldn't have fallen down nearly so often. But had the moon been in the sky, Videssian sentries might well have seen him and his comrades, and that would have been disastrous.

He tapped Turan-he hoped it was Turan-on the shoulder. «Get going. You know what to do.»

«Aye, lord.» The whisper came back in the voice of his lieutenant. That took one weight off his mind, leaving no more than ninety or a hundred.

Turan and the band he led slipped away. To Abivard they seemed to be making an appalling amount of noise. The Videssians not far away-not far away at all-appeared to notice nothing, though. Maybe the crickets were drowning out Turan's racket. Or maybe, Abivard thought, you're wound as tight as a youth going into his first battle, and every little noise is loud in your ears.

Had he had better officers, he wouldn't have been out here himself, nor would Turan. But if you couldn't trust someone else to do the job properly, you had to take care of it for yourself. Had Abivard been younger and less experienced, he would have found crouching there in the bushes exciting. How often did a commanding general get to lead his own raiding party? How many times does a commanding general want to lead his own raiding party? he wondered, and came up with no good answer.

He hunkered down, listening to the crickets, smelling the manure-much of it from the farmers themselves-in the fields.

Waiting came hard, as it always did. He was beginning to think Turan had somehow gone astray when a great commotion broke out among the Videssians' tethered horses. Some of the animals whinnied in excitement as the lines holding them were cut; others screamed in pain and panic when swords slashed their sides. Turan and his men ran up and down the line, doing as much harm in as short a time as they could.

Mingled with the cries of the horses were those of the sentries guarding them. Some of those cries were cut off abruptly as Turan's followers cut down the Videssians. But some sentries survived and fought and helped raise the alarm for their fellows in the tents off to the side of the horse lines.

The watch fires burning around those tents showed men bursting forth from them, helms jammed hastily onto heads, sword blades glittering. «Now!» Abivard shouted. The warriors who had stayed behind with him started shooting arrows into the midst of the Videssians. At night and at long range they could hardly aim, but with enough arrows and enough targets, some were bound to strike home. Screams said that some did.

Abivard plucked arrow after arrow from his bow case, shooting as fast as he could. This was a different sort of warfare from the one to which he was accustomed. Normally he hunted with the bow but in battle charged with the lance. Using archery against men felt strange.

Strange or not, he saw Videssians topple and fall. Hurting one's foe was what war was all about, so he stopped worrying about how he was doing it. He also saw more Videssians, urged on by cursing officers, trot out toward him and his men.

He gauged their numbers-many more than he had. «Back, back, back!» he yelled. Most of the soldiers he had with him were men from the city garrisons, not Turan's troopers. They saw nothing shameful about retreat. Very much the reverse; he heard a couple of them grumbling that he'd waited too long to order it.

They ran back toward the rest. Most of them wore only tunics, so Abivard in their midst felt himself surrounded by ghosts. When they'd gotten across the biggest canal between Maniakes' camp and their own, some of them attacked its eastern bank with a mattock. Water poured out onto the fields.

The Makuraners raised a cheer when Abivard and his little band returned after losing only a couple of men. «That was better than a flea bite,» he declared. «We've nipped their finger like an ill-mannered lapdog, perhaps. The God willing, we'll do worse when next we meet.» His men cheered again more loudly.

«The God willing,» Roshnani said when he'd returned to the wagon giddy with triumph and date wine, «you won't feel compelled to lead another raid like that any time soon.» Abivard did not argue with her.

Abivard hoped Maniakes would be angry enough at the lapdog nip he'd given him to lunge straight ahead without worrying about the consequences. A couple of years before Maniakes would have been likely to do just that; he'd had a way of leaping before he looked. And if he was heading straight for Mashiz, as Sharbaraz had thought-as Sharbaraz had feared-Abivard's army lay directly across his path. That hadn't been easy to arrange, since it involved maneuvering infantry against cavalry.

But to Abivard's dismay, Maniakes did not try to bull his way straight to Mashiz. Instead, he moved north toward the Mylasa Sea, up into the very heart of the land of the Thousand Cities.

«We have to follow him,» Abivard said when a scout brought the unwelcome news that the Avtokrator had broken camp. «If he gets around us, our army might as well fall into the Void for all the help it will be to the realm.»

As soon as he put his army on the road, he made another unpleasant discovery. Up till that time his forces had been impeding Maniakes' movements by destroying canals. Now, suddenly, the boot was on the other foot. The floods that spilled out over the fields and gardens of the lands between the rivers meant that he had to move slowly in pursuit of the Videssians.

While his men were struggling with water and mud, a great pillar of smoke rose into the sky ahead of him. «That's not a camp,» Abivard said grimly. «That's not the ordinary smoke from city, either. It's the pyre of a town that's been sacked and burned.»

So indeed it proved to be. Just as the sack was beginning, Maniakes had gathered up a couple of servants of the God and sent them back to Abivard with a message. «He said this to us with his own lips and in our tongue so we could not misunderstand,» one of the men said. «We were to tell you this is repayment for what Videssos has suffered at the hands of Makuran. We were also to tell you this was only the first coin of the stack.»

«Were you?» Abivard said.

The servants of the God nodded together. Abivard's pedagogue had given him a nodding acquaintance with logic and rhetoric and other strange Videssian notions. Years of living inside the Empire and dealing with its people had taught him more. Not so the servants of the God, who didn't know what to do with a rhetorical question.

Sighing, Abivard said, «If that's how Maniakes intends to fight this war, it will be very ugly indeed.»

«He said you would say that very thing, lord,» one of the servants of the God said, scratching himself through his dirty yellow robe. «He said to tell you, if you did, that to Videssos it was already ugly and that we of Makuran needed to be reminded wars aren't always fought on the other man's soil.»

Abivard sighed again. «Did he tell you anything else?»

«He did, lord,» the other holy man answered. «He said he would leave the Thousand Cities if the armies of the King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, leave Videssos and Vaspurakan.»

«Did he?» Abivard said, and then said no more. He had no idea whether Maniakes meant that as a serious proposal or merely as a ploy to irk him. Irked he was. He had no intention of sending Sharbaraz the Avtokrator's offer. The King of Kings was inflamed enough without it. The servants of the God waited to hear what he would say. He realized he would have to respond. «If we can destroy Maniakes here, he'll be in no position to propose anything.»

Destroying Maniakes, though, was beginning to look as hard to Abivard as stopping the Makuraners formerly had to have looked to the Videssian Emperor.

Up on its mound the city of Khurrembar still smoked. Videssian siege engines had knocked a breach in its mud-brick wall, allowing Maniakes' troopers in to sack it. One of these days the survivors would rebuild. When they did, so much new rubble would lie underfoot that the hill of Khurrembar would rise higher yet above the floodplain.

Surveying the devastation of what had been a prosperous city, Abivard said, «We must have more cavalry or Maniakes won't leave one town between the Tutub and the Tib intact.»

«You speak nothing but the truth, lord,» Turan answered, «but where will we come by horsemen? The garrisons hereabouts are all infantry. Easy enough to gather together a great lump of them, but once you have it, what do you do with it? By the time you move it here, the Videssians have already ridden there.»

«I'd even take Tzikas' regiment now,» Abivard said, a telling measure of his distress.

«Can we pry those men out of Vaspurakan?» Turan asked. «As you say, they'd come in handy now, whoever leads them.»

«Can we pry them loose?» Abivard plucked at his beard. He hadn't meant it seriously, but now Turan was forcing him to think of it that way. «The King of Kings was willing-even eager-to give them to me at the start of the campaign. I still despise Tzikas, but I could use his men. Perhaps I'll write to Sharbaraz-and to Mikhran marzban, too. The worst they can tell me is no, and how can hearing that make me worse off?»

«Well said, lord,» Turan said. «If you don't mind my telling you so, those letters shouldn't wait.»

«I'll write them today,» Abivard promised. «The next interesting question is, Will Tzikas want to come to the Thousand Cities when I call him? Finding out should be interesting. So should finding out how reliable he proves if he gets here. One more thing to worry about.» Turan corrected him: «Two more.» Abivard laughed and bowed. «You are a model of precision before which I can only yield.» His amusement vanished as quickly as it had appeared. «Now, to keep from having to yield to Maniakes' men-»

«Yield to them?» Turan said. «We can't keep up with them, which is, if you ask me, a worse problem than that. The Videssians, may they fall into the Void, move over the land of the Thousand Cities far faster than we can.»

«Over the land of the Thousand Cities-» Abivard suddenly leaned forward and kissed Turan on the cheek, as if to suggest his lieutenant were of higher rank than he. Turan stared till he began to explain.

Abivard laughed out loud. The rafts that now transported his part of the army up a branch of the Tib had carried beans and lentils down to the town where he'd commandeered them. With the current of the river, though, and with little square sails raised, they made a fair clip-certainly as fast as horses went if they alternated walk and trot as they usually did.

«Behold our fleet!» he said, waving to encompass the awkward vessels with which he hoped to steal a march on Maniakes. «We can't match the Videssians dromon for dromon on the sea, but let's see them match us raft for raft here on the rivers of the Thousand Cities.»

«No.» Roshnani sounded serious. «Let's not see them match us.»

«You're right,» Abivard admitted. «Like a lot of tricks, this one, I think, is good for only one use. We need to turn it into a victory.»

The flat, boring countryside flowed by on either bank of the river. Peasants laboring in the fields that the canals from the stream watered looked up and stared as the soldiers rafted north, then went back to their weeding. Off to the east another one of the Thousand Cities went up in smoke. Abivard hoped Maniakes would spend a good long while there and sack it thoroughly. That would keep him too busy to send scouts to the river to spy this makeshift flotilla. With luck, it would also let Abivard get well ahead of him.

Abivard also hoped Maniakes would continue to take the part of the army still trudging along behind him-now commanded by Turan-for the whole. If all went perfectly, Abivard would smash the Avtokrator between his hammer and Turan's anvil. If all went well, Abivard's part of the army would be able to meet the Videssians on advantageous terms. If all went not so well, something else would happen. The gamble, though, struck Abivard as worthwhile.

One advantage of the rafts that he hadn't thought of was that they kept moving through the night. The rafters took down the sails but used poles to keep their unwieldy craft away from the banks and from shallow places in the stream. They seemed so intimately acquainted with the river, they hardly needed to see it to know where they were and where the next troublesome stretch lay.

As with sorcery, Abivard admired and used the rafters' abilities without wanting to acquire those abilities himself. Even had he wanted to acquire them, the rafters weren't nearly so articulate as mages were. When Varaz asked one of them how he'd learned to do what he did, the fellow shrugged and answered, «Spend all your years on the water. You learn then. You learn or you drown.» That might have been true, but it left Varaz unenlightened. Abivard's concern was not for the rafts themselves but for the stretch of fertile ground along the eastern bank of the river he did not want to discover Videssian scouts riding there to take word of what he was doing back to Maniakes.

He did not see any scouts. Whether they were there at some distance, he could not have said. When the rafts came ashore just south of the city of Vepilanu, he acted on the assumption that he had been seen, ordering his soldiers to form a line of battle immediately. He visualized Videssian horsemen thundering down on them, wrecking them before they had so much as a chance to deploy.

Nothing of the sort happened, and he let out a silent sigh of relief where his half-trained troopers couldn't see it. «We'll take our positions along the canal,» he told the garrison troops, pointing to the broad ditch that ran east from the river. «If the Videssians want to go any farther north, they'll have to go through us.» The soldiers cheered. They hadn't done any righting yet; they didn't know what that was like. But they had done considerable foot slogging and then had endured the journey by raft. Those trials had at least begun to forge them into a unit that might prove susceptible to his will… provided that he didn't ask too much.

He knew that the field army he had commanded in the Videssian westlands would have smashed his force like a dropped pot. But the field army also had spent a lot of time smashing Videssian forces. What he still did not know was how good an army Maniakes had managed to piece together from the rubble often years of almost unbroken defeats.

For two days his soldiers stood to arms when they had to and spent most of the rest of their time trying to spear carp in the canal and slapping at the clouds of mosquitoes, gnats, midges, and flies that buzzed and hovered and darted above it. Some of them soon began to look like raw meat. Some of them came down with fevers, but not too many: most were native to the land and used to the water. Abivard hoped that more of the Videssians would sicken and that the ones who did would sicken worse. The Videssians had better, more skilled healers than his own people had but he didn't think they could stop an epidemic; diseases could be more deadly than a foe to an army.

The Videssian scouts who discovered his army showed no sign of illness. They rode along the southern bank of the canal, looking for a place to cross. Abivard wished he'd given them an obvious one and then tried to ambush Maniakes' forces when they used it. Instead, he'd done his best to make the whole length of the canal seem impassable.

«You can't think of everything all the time,» Roshnani consoled him when he complained about that.

«But I have to,» he answered. «I feel the weight of the whole realm pressing down on my shoulders.» He paused to shake his head and slap at a mosquito. «Now I begin to understand why Maniakes and even Genesios wouldn't treat with me while I was on Videssian soil: they must have felt they were all that stood between me and ruin.» His laugh rang bitter. «Maniakes has managed to put that boot on my foot»

Roshnani sounded bitter, too, but for a different reason. Lowering her voice so that only Abivard could hear, she said, «I wonder what Sharbaraz King of Kings feels now. Less than you, or I miss my guess.»

«I'm not doing this for Sharbaraz,» Abivard said. «I'm doing it for Makuran.» But what helped Makuran also helped the King of Kings.

Abivard had not seen the Videssian banner, gold sunburst on blue, flying anywhere in the westlands of the Empire for years. To see that banner now in among the Thousand Cities came as a shock. He peered across the canal at the Videssian force that had come up to challenge his. The first thing that struck him was how small it was. If this was as much of the Videssian army as Maniakes had rebuilt, he was operating on a shoestring. One defeat, maybe two, and he'd have nothing left.

He must have known that, too, but he didn't let on that it bothered him. His troopers rode up and down along the canal as the scouts had the day before, looking for a place to force a crossing and join battle with their Makuraner foes. There weren't many of them, but they did look like good troops. Like Abivard's field force, they had a way of responding to commands instantly and without wasted motion. Abivard judged that they would do the same in battle.

A couple of times the Videssians made as if to cross the canal, but Abivard's men shot swarms of arrows at them, and they desisted. The garrison troops walked tall and puffed out their chests with pride. Abivard was glad of that but did not think the archery was what had thwarted the Videssians. He judged that Maniakes was trying to make him shift troops back and forth either to expose or to create a weakness along his line. Declining to be drawn out, he sat tight, concentrating his men at the fords about which the peasants told him. If Maniakes wanted to come farther, he would have to do it on Abivard's terms.

As the sun set, the Videssians, instead of forcing another attack, made camp. Abivard thought about trying to disrupt them again but decided against it. For one thing, he suspected that Maniakes would have done a better job of posting sentries than he had before. And for another, he did not want to make the Videssians move. He wanted them to stay where they were so he could pin them between the force he had with him and the rest of his army which was still slowly slogging up from the south.

He looked east and west along the canal. As far as his eye could see, the campfires of his own host blazed. That encouraged him; the numbers that had seemed to be useless when he had begun assembling the garrison troops into an army proved valuable after all, in defense if not in attack.

«Will we fight tomorrow?» Roshnani and Varaz asked together. His wife sounded concerned, his elder son excited.

«It's up to Maniakes now,» Abivard answered. «If he wants to stay where he is, I'll let him-till the other half of my men come up. If he tries to force a crossing before then, we'll have a battle on our hands.»

«We'll beat him,» Varaz declared.

«Will we beat him?» Roshnani asked quietly.

«Mother!» Now Varaz sounded indignant. «Of course we'll beat him! The men of Makuran have been beating Videssians for as long as I've been alive, and they've never beaten us, not once, in all that time.»

Above his head Abivard and Roshnani exchanged amused looks. Every word he'd said was true, but that truth was worth less than he thought. His life did not reach over a great stretch of time, and Maniakes' army was better and Abivard's worse than had been true in any recent encounters.

«If Maniakes attacks us, we'll give him everything he wants,» Abivard promised. «And if he doesn't attack us, we'll give him everything he wants then, too. The only thing is, that will take longer.»

When it grew light enough to see across the canal, sentries came shouting to wake Abivard, who'd let exhaustion overwhelm him at a time he gauged by the moon to be well after midnight. Yawning and rubbing sand from his eyes with his knuckles, he stumbled out of his tent-the wagon hadn't gone aboard the raft- and walked down to the edge of the water to see why the guards had summoned him.

Already drawn up in battle array, the Videssian army stood, impressively silent, impressively dangerous-looking, in the brightening morning light. As he stood watching them, they sat on their horses and stared over the irrigation channel toward him.

Yes, that was Maniakes at their head. He recognized not only the imperial armor but also the man who wore it. To Maniakes he was just another Makuraner in a caftan. He turned away from the canal and called orders. Horns blared. Drums thumped. Men began tumbling out of tents and bedrolls, looking to their weapons.

Abivard ordered archers right up to the bank of the canal to shoot at the Videssians. Here and there an imperial trooper in the front ranks slid off his horse or a horse bounded out of its place in line, squealing as an arrow pierced it

A return barrage would have hurt Abivard's unarmored infantry worse than their shooting had harmed the Videssians. Instead of staying where he was and getting into a duel of arrows with the Makuraners, though, Maniakes, with much loud signaling from trumpets and pipes, ordered his little army into motion, trotting east along the southern bank of the canal. Abivard's troops cheered to see the Videssians ride off, perhaps thinking they'd driven them away. Abivard knew better.

«Form line of battle facing east!» he called, and the musicians with the army blew great discordant blasts on their horns and thumped the drums with a will. The soldiers responded as best they could: not nearly so fast as Abivard would have expected from trained professionals, not nearly so raggedly as they would have a few weeks before.

Once they had formed up, he marched all of them after Maniakes except for a guard he left behind at the ford. He knew he could not match the speed of cavalry with men afoot but hoped that, if the Videssians forced a crossing, he could meet them at a place of his choosing, not theirs.

He found such a place about half a farsang east of the encampment: rising ground behind a north-south canal flowing into-or perhaps out of-the larger one that ran east-west. There he established himself with the bulk of his force, sending a few men ahead to get word of what was happening farther east. If one of his detachments was battling to keep Maniakes from fording the bigger canal, Abivard would order more troops forward to help. If it was already too late for that…

The canal behind which he'd positioned his men was perhaps ten feet wide and hardly more than knee-deep. It would not have stopped advancing infantry; it wouldn't do anything but slow oncoming horses a little. Abivard's foot soldiers stood in line at the crest of their little rise. Some grumbled about having missed breakfast, and others boasted of what they would do when they finally came face to face with Maniakes' men.

That was harmless and, since it helped them build courage, might even have helped. What be feared they would do, on facing soldiers trained in a school harder than garrison duty, was run as if demons like those the Prophets Four had vanquished were after them.

«These are the tools Sharbaraz gave me,» Abivard muttered, «and I'm the one he'll blame if they break in my hand.» Already, though, he'd drawn Maniakes away from the straight road to Mashiz, and so Sharbaraz, with luck, was breathing easier on his throne.

He shaded his eyes against the sun and peered eastward. Dust didn't rise up from under horses' hooves in this well-irrigated country as it did most places, but the glitter of sun off chain mail was unmistakable. So was the group of men fleeing his way. Maniakes' troopers had found and forced a ford.

Abivard yelled like a man possessed, readying his army against the imminent Videssian attack as best he could. Maniakes' horsemen grew with alarming speed from glints of sun off metal to toy soldiers that somehow moved of their own accord to real warriors. Abivard watched his own men for signs of panic as the Videssians, horns blaring, came up to the canal behind which his force waited.

Water splashed and sprayed upward when the imperials rode into the canal. Just for an instant the Videssians seemed to be wreathed in rainbows. Then, as if tearing a veil, they galloped through them, up onto the rising ground that led to Abivard's position.

«Shoot!» Abivard shouted. His own trumpeters echoed and amplified the command. The archers in his army snatched arrows from their quivers, drew their bows to the ear, and let fly at the oncoming Videssians. The thrum of bowstrings and the hissing drone of arrows through the air put Abivard in mind of horseflies.

Like horseflies, the arrows bit hard. Videssians tumbled from the saddle. Horses crashed to the ground. Other horses behind them could not swerve in time and fell over them, throwing more riders.

But the Videssians did not press their charge with the thundering drumroll of lances Abivard's field force would have used. Instead, their archers returned arrows at long range. Some of their javelin men did ride closer so they could hurl the light spears at the Makuraners. That done, the riders would gallop back out of range. Except for helmets and wicker shields, Abivard's men had no armor to speak of. When an arrow struck, it wounded. Near Abivard a man moaned and clutched at a shaft protruding from his belly. Blood ran between his fingers. His feet kicked at the ground in agony. The soldiers on either side of him gaped in honor and dismay. No, garrison duty had not prepared them for anything like this.

But they did not run. They dragged their stricken comrade out of the line and then returned to their own places. One of them stuffed the wounded man's arrows into his own bow case and went back to shooting at the Videssians with no more fuss than if he'd just straightened his caftan after making water.

The Videssians wore swords on their belts but did not come close enough to use them. Abivard's spirits rose. He shook his fist at Maniakes, who stayed just out of arrow range. The Avtokrator was finding out that facing Makuraners was a different business from beating barbarians. Where was the dash, the aggressiveness the Videssians had shown against the Kubratoi? Not here, not if they couldn't make a better showing than this against the inexperienced troops Abivard commanded.

Maniakes' one abiding flaw as a commander had been that he thought he could do more than he could. If he couldn't make his men go forward against garrison troops, he'd soon get a rude surprise as the rest of Abivard's army came up to try to cut off his escape. Before this fight began Abivard had had scarcely any hope of accomplishing that. Now, seeing how tentative the Videssians were…

It was almost as if Maniakes had no particular interest in winning the fight but merely wanted to keep it going. When that thought crossed Abivard's mind, his head went up like a fox's on catching the scent of rabbit-or, rather, like a rabbit's on catching the scent of fox.

He didn't see anything untoward. There, at the front, the Videssians were keeping up their halfhearted archery duel with his soldiers. Because they were so much better armored than their foes, they were causing more casualties than they suffered. They were not causing nearly enough, though, to force Abivard's men from their position, nor were they trying to bull their way through the line. What exactly were they doing?

Abivard peered south, wondering if Maniakes had gotten into a fight here so he could sneak raftloads of Videssians over the large canal and into the Makuraner rear. He saw no sign of it. Had the Avtokrator's sorcerers come up with something new in the line of battle magic? There was no sign of that, either no cries of alarm from the mages with Abivard's force, no Makuraner soldiers suddenly falling over dead.

A moment before his head would have turned in that direction anyhow, Abivard heard sudden shouts of alarm from the north The horsemen riding down on his army came behind a banner bearing a gold sunburst on a field of blue. Maniakes' detachment must have crossed the large canal well to the east before his own men had moved so far. They'd trotted right out of his field of view-but they were back now.

«I thought Maniakes had more men than that,» Abivard said, as much to himself as to anyone else. While he'd been trying to trap the Videssians between the two pieces of his army, they'd been frying to do the same thing to him. The only difference was that they'd managed to spring their trap.

The battle was lost-no help for that now. The only thing left was to save as much as he could from the wreck. «Hold fast!» he shouted to his men. «Hold fast! If you run from them, you're done for.»

One advantage of numbers was having reserves to commit. He sent all the men in back of the line up to the north to face the oncoming Videssians squarely; if he'd tried swinging around the troops that already were engaged, he would have lost everything in confusion and in the certainty of being hit from the flank.

Maniakes' Videssians held back no more. The Avtokrator had kept Abivard in play until his detached force could reach the field. Now he pressed forward as aggressively as he had before he'd had the resources to let him get by with a headlong attack. This time, he did.

The Videssians, instead of stopping short and plying Abivard's army with arrows, charged up with drawn swords and got in among the garrison troops, hacking down at them from horseback. Abivard felt a certain somber pride in his men, who performed better than he'd dared hope. They fell-by scores, by hundreds they fell-but they did not break. They did what they could to fight back, stabbing horses and dragging Videssians out of the saddle to grapple with them in the dirt.

On the northern flank the blow fell at about the same time as it did in the east. It fell harder in the north, for the soldiers there had not gotten a taste of fighting but were rushed up to plug a gap. Still, the Videssians did not have it all their own way there, as they might have hoped. They did not-they could not-break through into the rear of the Makuraner line and roll up Abivard's men like a seamstress rolling up a line of yarn.

He rode north, figuring to show himself where he was most needed. He wished he'd had a few hundred men from the field force up in Vaspurakan with him. They would have sent the Videssians reeling off in dismay. No, he wouldn't have minded- well, he didn't think he would have minded-if Tzikas had been at the head of the regiment. The Videssian renegade could hardly have made things worse.

«Hold as firm as you can!» Abivard yelled. Telling his soldiers to yield no ground at all was useless now; they were retreating, as any troops caught in a like predicament would have done. But were retreats and retreats. If you kept facing the foe and hurting him wherever you could, you had a decent chance of coming whole through a lost battle. But if you turned tail and ran, you would be cut down from behind. You couldn't fight back that way.

«Rally on the baggage train!» Abivard commanded. «We won't let them have that, will we, lads?»

That order surely would have made the field army fight harder. All the booty those soldiers had collected in years of triumphant battle traveled in the baggage train; if they lost it, some of them would have lost much of their wealth. The men who had come from the city garrisons were poorer and had not spent years storing up captured money and jewels and weapons. Would they battle to save their supplies of flour and smoked meat?

As things turned out, they did. They used the wagons as small fortresses, fighting from inside them and from the shelter they gave. Abivard had hoped for that but had not ordered it for fear of being disobeyed.

Again and again the Videssians tried to break their tenuous hold on the position, to drive them away from the baggage train so they could be cut down while flying or forced into the big canal and drowned.

The Makuraners would not let themselves be dislodged. The fight raged through the afternoon. Abivard broke his lance and was reduced to clouting Videssians with the stump. Even with its scale mail armor, his horse took several wounds. He had an incentive to hold the baggage wagons: his wife and family were sheltering among them.

Maniakes drew his troops back from combat about an hour before sunset. At first Abivard thought nothing of that, but the Avtokrator of the Videssians did not send them forward again. Instead, singing a triumphant hymn to their Phos, they rode off toward the nearest town.

Abivard ordered his horn players to blow the call for pursuit He had the satisfaction of seeing several Videssians' heads whip around in alarm. But despite the defiant horn calls, he was utterly unable to pursue Maniakes' army, and he knew it. The mounted foes were faster than his own foot soldiers, and despite the protection they'd finally gotten from the wagons of the baggage train, his men had taken a far worse drubbing. He began riding around to see just how bad things were.

A soldier sat stolidly while another one sewed up his wounded shoulder. He nodded to Abivard. «You must be one tough general, lord, if you beat them buggers year in and year out. They can fight some.» He laughed at his own understatement.

«You can fight some yourself,» Abivard answered. Though beaten, the garrison troops had done themselves proud. Abivard knew that was so and also knew that Sharbaraz King of Kings would not see it the same way. Having done his best to make victory impossible, Sharbaraz now insisted that nothing less would do. If the miracle inexplicably failed to materialize, he would not blame himself-not while he had Abivard.

Weary soldiers began lighting campfires and seeing about supper. Abivard grabbed a lump of hard bread-that better described the misshapen object the cook gave him than would a neutral term such as loaf-and a couple of onions and went from fire to fire, talking with his men and praising them for having held their ground as well as they had.

«Aye, well, lord, sorry it didn't work out no better than it did,» one of the warriors answered, picking absently at the black blood on the edges of a cut that ran from just below his ear to near the corner of his mouth. «They beat us, is all.»

«Maybe next time we beat them,» another warrior put in. He drew a dagger from his belt. «Give you a chunk of mutton sausage-» He held it up."-for half of one of those onions.»

«I'll make that trade,» Abivard said, and did. Munching, he reflected that the soldier might well be right. If his army got another chance against the Videssians, they might well beat them. Getting that chance would be the hard part. He'd stolen a march on Maniakes once, but how likely was he to be able to do it twice? When you had one throw of the dice and didn't roll the twin twos of the Prophets Four, what did you do next?

He didn't know, not in any large sense of the word, not with the force he had here. On a smaller scale, what you did was keep your men in good spirits if you could so that they wouldn't brood on this defeat and expect another one in the next fight. Most of the men with whom he talked didn't seem unduly downhearted. Most of them in fact seemed happier about the world than he was.

When he finally got back to his tent, he expected to find everyone asleep. As it had the night before, the moon told him it was past midnight Snores from soldiers exhausted after the day's marching and fighting mingled with the groans of the wounded. Out beyond the circles of light the campfires threw, crickets chirped. Mosquitoes buzzed far from the fires and close by. Every so often someone cursed as he was bitten.

Seeing Pashang beside the fire in front of the tent was not a large surprise, nor was having Roshnani poke her head out when she heard his approaching footsteps. But when Varaz stuck his head out, too, Abivard blinked in startlement.

«I'm angry at you, Papa,» his elder son exclaimed. «I wanted to go and fight the Videssians today, but Mama wouldn't let me- she said you said I was too little. I could have hit them with my bow; I know I could.»

«Yes, you probably could,» Abivard agreed gravely. «But they could have hit you, too, and what would you have done when the fighting got to close quarters? You're learning the sword, but you haven't learned it well enough to hold off a grown man.»

«I think I have,» Varaz declared.

«When I was your age, I thought the same thing,» Abivard told him. «I was wrong, and so are you.»

«I don't think I am,» Varaz said.

Abivard sighed. «That's what I said to my father, too, and it got me no further with him than you're getting with me. Looking back, though, he was right. A boy can't stand against men, not if he hopes to do anything else afterward. Your time will come-and one fine day, the God willing, you'll worry about keeping your son out of fights he isn't ready for.»

Varaz looked eloquently unconvinced. His voice had years to go before it started deepening. His cheeks bore only fine down. To expect him to think of the days when he'd be a father himself was to ask too much. Abivard knew that but preferred argument to breaking his son's spirit by insisting on blind obedience.

There was, however, a time and place for everything. Roshnani cut off the debate, saying, «Quarrel about it tomorrow. You'll get the same answer, Varaz, because it's the only one your parents can give you, but you'll get it after your father has had some rest.»

Abivard hadn't let himself think about that. Hearing the word made him realize how worn he was. He said, «If you two don't want my footprints on your robes, you'd best get out of the way.» Before long he was lying in the crowded tent on a blanket under mosquito netting. Then, no matter how his body craved sleep, it would not come. He had to fight the battle over again, first in his own mind and then, softly, aloud for his principal wife. «You did everything you could,» Roshnani assured him. «I should have realized Maniakes had split his army, too,» he said. «I thought it looked small, but I didn't know how many men he really had, and so-»

«Only the God knows all there is to know, and only she acts in perfect lightness on what she does know,» Roshnani said. «This once, the Videssians were luckier than we.»

Everything she said was true and in perfect accord with Abivard's own thoughts. Somehow that helped not at all. «The King of Kings, may his years be long and his realm increase, entrusted me with this army to-»

«To get you killed or at best ruined,» Roshnani broke in quietly but with terrible venom in her voice.

He'd had those thoughts, too. «To defend the realm,» he went on, as if she hadn't spoken. «If I don't do that, nothing else I do, no matter how well I do it, matters anymore. Any soldier would say the same. So will Sharbaraz.»

Roshnani stirred but did not speak right away. At last she said, «The army still holds together. You'll have your chance at revenge.»

«That depends,» Abivard said. Roshnani made a questioning noise. He explained: «On what Sharbaraz does when he hears I've lost, I mean.»

«Oh,» Roshnani said. On that cheerful note they fell asleep.

When Abivard emerged from the wagon the next morning, Er-Khedur, the town north and east of the battle site, was burning. His mouth twisted into a thin, bitter line. If his army couldn't keep the Videssians in check, why should the part of the garrison of Er-Khedur he'd left behind?

He didn't realize he'd asked the question aloud till Pashang answered it: «They did have a wall to fight from, lord.»

That mattered less in opposing the Videssians than it would have against the barbarous Khamorth, perhaps less than it would have in opposing a rival Makuraner army. The Videssians were skillful when it came to siegecraft. Wall or no wall, a handful of half-trained troops would not have been enough to keep them out of the city.

Abivard thought about going right after the imperials and trying to trap them inside Er-Khedur. Reluctantly, he decided not to. They'd just mauled his army once; he wanted to drill his troops before he put them into battle again. And he doubted the Videssians would tamely let themselves be trapped. They had no need to stay and defend Er-Khedur; they could withdraw and ravage some other city instead.

The Videssians didn't have to stay and defend any one point in the Thousand Cities. The chief reason they were there was to do as much damage as they could. That gave them more freedom of movement than Abivard had had when he was conquering the westlands from the Empire. He'd wanted to seize land intact first and destroy it only if he had to. Maniakes operated under no such restraints.

And how were the westlands faring these days? As far as Abivard knew, they remained in the hands of the King of Kings. Dominating the sea as he did, Maniakes hadn't had to think about freeing them before he invaded Makuran. Now each side in the war had forces deep in the other's territory. He wondered if that had happened before in the history of warfare. He knew of no songs that suggested that it had. Groundbreaking was an uncomfortable sport to play, as he'd found out when ending Roshnani's isolation from the world.

If he couldn't chase right after Maniakes, what could he do? One thing that occurred to him was to send messengers south over the canal to find out how close Turan was with the rest of the assembled garrison troops. He could do more with the whole army than he could with this battered piece of it

The scouts rode back late that afternoon with word that they'd found the host Turan commanded. Abivard thanked them and then went off away from his men to kick at the rich black dirt in frustration. He'd come so close to catching Maniakes between the halves of the Makuraner force; that the Videssians had caught him between the halves of theirs seemed most unfair.

He posted sentries out as far as a farsang from his camp, wanting to be sure Maniakes could not catch him by surprise. He had considerably more respect for the Videssian Avtokrator now than he'd had when his forces had been routing Maniakes' at every turn.

When he said as much, Roshnani raised an eyebrow and remarked, «Amazing what being beaten will do, isn't it?» He opened his mouth, then closed it, discovering himself without any good answer.

Turan's half of the Makuraner army reached the canal a day and a half later. After the officer had crossed over and kissed Abivard's cheek by way of greeting, he said, «Lord, I wish you could have waited before you started your fight.»

«Now that you mention it, so do I,» Abivard answered. «We don't always have all the choices we'd like, though.»

«That's so,» Turan admitted. He looked around as if gauging the condition of Abivard's part of the army. «Er-lord, what do we do now?»

«That's a good question,» Abivard said politely, and then proceeded not to answer it. Turan's expression was comical, or would have been had the army's plight been less serious. But here, unlike in his conversations with his wife, Abivard understood he would have to make a reply. At last he said, «One way or another we're going to have to get Maniakes out of the land of the Thousand Cities before he smashes it all to bits.»

«We just tried that,» Turan answered. «It didn't work so well as we'd hoped.»

«One way or another, I said,» Abivard told him. «There is something we haven't tried in fullness, because as a cure it's almost worse than the sickness of invasion.»

«What's that?» Turan asked. Again Abivard didn't answer, letting his lieutenant work it out for himself. After a while Turan did. Snapping his fingers, he said, «You want to do a proper job of flooding the plain.»

«No, I don't want to do that,» Abivard said. «But if it's the only way to get rid of Maniakes, I will do it.» He laughed wryly. «And if I do, half the Thousand Cities will close their gates to me because they'll think I'm a more deadly plague than Maniakes ever was.»

«They're our subjects,» Turan said in a that-settles-it tone.

«Yes, and if we push them too far, they'll be our rebellious subjects,» Abivard said. «When Genesios ruled Videssos, he had a new revolt against him every month, or so it seemed. The same could happen to us.»

Now Turan didn't answer at all. Abivard started to try to get him to say something, to say anything, then suddenly stopped. One of the things he was liable to say was that Abivard might lead a revolt himself. Abivard didn't want to hear that. If he did hear it, he would have to figure out what to do about Turan. If he let his lieutenant say it without responding, he would in effect be guilty of treasonous conspiracy. If Turan wanted to take word of that back to Sharbaraz, he could. But if Abivard punished him for saying such a thing, he would cost himself an able officer.

And so, to forestall any response, Abivard changed the subject: «Do your men still have their fighting spirit?»

«They did till they got here and saw bodies out in the sun starting to stink,» Turan said. «They did till they saw men down with festering wounds or out of their heads from fever. They're garrison troops. Most of 'em never saw what the aftermath of a battle-especially a lost battle-looks like before. But your men seem to be taking it pretty well.»

«Yes, and I'm glad of that,» Abivard said. «When we'd beat the Videssians, they'd go all to pieces and run every which way. I thought my own raw troops would do the same thing, but they haven't, and I'm proud of them for it.»

«I can see that, since it would have been your neck, too, if they did fall apart,» Turan said judiciously. «But you can fight another battle with 'em, and they're ready to do it, too. My half of the army will be better for seeing that.»

«They are ready to fight again,» Abivard agreed. «That surprises me, too, maybe more than anything else.» He waved toward the northeast, the direction in which Maniakes' army had gone. «The only question is. Will we be able to catch up with the Videssians and bring them to battle again? It's because I have my doubts that I'm thinking so hard of flooding the land between the Tutub and the Tib.»

«I understand your reasons, lord,» Turan said, «but it strikes me as a counsel of desperation, and there are a lot of city governors it would strike the same way. And if they're not happy-» He broke off once more. They'd already been around to that point on the wheel.

Abivard didn't know how to keep them from going around again, either. But before he had to try, a scout interrupted the circle, crying, «Lord, cavalry approach from out of the north!»

Maybe Maniakes hadn't been satisfied to beat just one piece of the Makuraner army, after all. Maybe he was coming back to see if he could smash the other half, too. Such thoughts ran through Abivard's mind in the couple of heartbeats before he shouted to the trumpeters: «Blow the call for line of battle!»

Martial music rang out. Men grabbed weapons and rushed to their places more smoothly than he would have dared hope a couple of weeks before. If Maniakes was coming back to finish the job, he'd get a warm reception. Abivard was pleased to see how well Turan's troops moved along with his own, who had been blooded. The former squadron commander had done well with as large a body of men.

«Sharbaraz!» roared the Makuraner troops as the on-rushing cavalry drew near. A few of them yelled «Abivard!» too, making their leader proud and apprehensive at the same time.

And then they got a better look at the approaching army. They cried out in wonder and delight, for it advanced under the red-lion banner of the King of Kings. And its soldiers also cried Sharbaraz name, and some few of them the name of their commander as well: «Tzikas!»