«By the God,» Tzikas replied, again reminding Abivard that he had bound himself to Makuran for better or for worse-or until he sees a chance for some new treachery, Abivard thought- «we should push straight at Maniakes with everything we have and force him out of the land of the Thousand Cities.»
«I'd love to,» Abivard said. «The only problem with the plan is that everything we have hasn't been enough to force him out of the Thousand Cities.»
Tzikas didn't answer, not with words. He simply donned another of those characteristically Videssian expressions, this one saying that, had he been in charge of things, they would have gone better.
Before Abivard could get angry at that, he realized there was another problem with the scheme the Videssian renegade had proposed. Like Tzikas' plan for fighting Makuran had he been Avtokrator, this one lacked imagination; it showed no sense of where the enemy's real weakness lay.
Slowly Abivard said, «Suppose we do force Maniakes away from the Tutub. What happens next? Where does he go?»
«He falls back into the westlands. Where else can he go?» Tzikas said. «Then, I suppose, he makes for the coast, whether north or south I couldn't begin to guess. And then he sails away, and Makuran is rid of him till the spring campaigning season, by which time, the God willing, we shall be better prepared to face him here in the land of the Thousand Cities than we were this year.»
«My guess is he'll go south,» Abivard said. «To reach the coast of the Videssian Sea, he'd have to skirt Vaspurakan, where we have a force that should be coming out to hunt him anyhow, and he controls none of the ports along that coast. But he's taken Lyssaion, which means he has a gateway out on the coast of the Sailors' Sea.»
«Clearly reasoned,» Tzikas agreed. From a Videssian that was no small praise. «Yes, I suppose he likely will escape to the south, and we shall be rid of him-and we shall not miss him one bit.»
«Do you play the Videssian board game?» Abivard asked, continuing, «I was never very good at it, but I liked it because it leaves nothing to chance but rests everything on the skill of the players.»
«Yes, I play it,» Tzikas answered. By the predatory look that came into his eyes, he played well. «Perhaps you would honor me with a game one day.»
«As I say, you'd mop the floor with me,» Abivard said, reflecting that Tzikas would no doubt enjoy mopping the floor with him, too. «But that's not the point. The point is, you can hurt the fellow playing the other side, sometimes hurt him a lot, just by putting one of your pieces between his piece and where it's trying to go.»
«And so?» Tzikas said, right at the edge of rudeness. But then his manner changed. «I begin to see, lord, what may be in your mind.»
«Good,» Abivard told him, less sardonically than he'd intended. «If we can set an army on his road down to Lyssaion, that will cause him all manner of grief. And unless I misremember, delaying him on the road to Lyssaion really matters at this season of the year.»
«You remember rightly, lord,» Tzikas said. «The Sailors' Sea turns stormy in the fall and stays stormy through the winter. No captain would want to risk taking his Avtokrator and the best soldiers Videssos has back to the capital by sea, not in a few weeks, not when he'd know he was only too likely to lose them all. And that would mean-»
«That would mean Maniakes would have to try to cross the westlands to get home,» Abivard said, interrupting not from irritation but from excitement. «He'd have to capture each town along the way if he wanted to encamp in it, and the winter there is hard enough that he'd have to try-he couldn't very well live under canvas till spring came. So if we can get between him and Lyssaion, we don't even have to win a battle-»
«A good thing, too, with these odds and sods under your command,» Tzikas broke in. Now he was being rude but not inaccurate.
«And whose fault is it that Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, wouldn't trust me with better?» Abivard retorted. The prospect of discomfiting Maniakes made him better able to tolerate Tzikas, so that came out as badinage, not rage. He went on, «If you think they're bad now, you should have seen them when I first got them. Eminent sir, they're brave enough, and they are starting to learn their trade.»
«I'd cheerfully trade them for a like number of real soldiers nonetheless,» Tzikas said, again impolite but again correct.
Abivard said, «It's settled, then. We advance against Maniakes and demonstrate in front of him, with luck making him abandon his base here. And as he moves south, we have a force waiting to engage him. We don't have to win; we simply have to keep him in play till it's too late for him to sail out of Lyssaion.»
«That's it,» Tzikas said. He bowed to Abivard. «A plan worthy of Stavrakios the Great.» The Videssian renegade suddenly suffered a coughing fit; Stavrakios was the Avtokrator who'd smashed every Makuraner army he had faced and had occupied Mashiz. When Tzikas could speak again, he went on: «Worthy of the great heroes of Makuran, I should have said.»
«It's all right,» Abivard said magnanimously. In a way he was relieved Tzikas had slipped. The cavalry officer did do an alarmingly good job of aping the Makuraners with whom he'd had to cast his lot. It was just as well he'd proved he remained a Videssian at heart.
Abivard wasted no time sending a good part of his army south along the Tutub. Had he seriously intended to defeat Maniakes as the Avtokrator headed for Lyssaion, he would have gone with that force. As things were, he sent it out under the reliable Turan. He commanded the rest of the Makuraner army, the part demonstrating against Maniakes in his lair.
His force included almost all of Tzikas' cavalry regiment. That left him nervous in spite of the accord he seemed to have reached with the Videssian renegade. Having betrayed Maniakes and Abivard both, was he now liable to betray one of them to the other? Abivard didn't want to find out.
But Tzikas stayed in line. His cavalry fought hard against the Videssian horsemen who battled to hold them away from Maniakes' base. He reveled in fighting for his adopted country against the men of his native land and worshiped the God more ostentatiously than did any Makuraner.
Maniakes once more took to breaking canals to keep Abivard's men at bay. Flooding was indeed a two-edged sword. Wearily, Abivard's soldiers and the local peasants worked side by side to repair the damage so the soldiers could go on and the peasants could save something of their crops.
And then, from the northeast, the smoke from a great burning rose into the sky, as it so often had in the land of the Thousand Cities that summer. More wrecked canals kept Abivard's men from reaching the site of that burning for another couple of days, but Abivard knew what it meant: Maniakes was gone.
VII
Abivard glared at the peasant in some exasperation. «You saw the Videssian army leave?» he demanded. The peasant nodded. «And which way did they go? Tell me again,» Abivard said.
«That way, lord.» The peasant pointed east, as he had before.
Everyone with whom Abivard had spoken had said the same thing. Yes, the Videssians were gone. Yes, the locals were glad- although they seemed less glad to see a Makuraner army arrive to take the invaders' place. And yes, Maniakes and his men had gone east. No one had seen them turn south.
He's being sneaky, Abivard thought. He'll go out into the scrub country between the Tutub and Videssos and stay there as long as he can, maybe even travel south a long way before he comes back to the river for water. You could travel a fair distance through that semidesert, especially when the fall rains-the same rains that would be storms on the Sailors' Sea-brought the grass and leaves to brief new life.
But you could not travel all the way down to Lyssaion without returning to the Tutub. Even lush scrub wouldn't support an army's horses indefinitely, and there weren't enough water holes to keep an army of men from perishing of thirst. And when Maniakes came back to the Tutub, Abivard would know exactly where he was.