«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.