«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.»