Laborers and camp followers were not permanent parts of an army, though. They came and went-or sometimes they stayed behind as the army came and went. Abivard ordered his men to bring in some of them so he could try to learn Tzikas' fate.
And so, a few days later, he found himself questioning a small, swarthy woman in a small, thin shift that clung to her wherever she would sweat-and in summer in the land of the Thousand Cities, there were very few places a woman or even a man would not sweat.
«You say you saw them bring him into the Videssian camp?» Abivard asked. He put the question in Videssian first and only afterward in Makuraner. The woman, whose name was Eshkinni, had learned a fair amount of the language of the Empire (and who could say what else?) in her time in the invaders' camp but used the tongue of the floodplain, of which Abivard knew a bare handful of words, in preference to Makuraner. Eshkinni tossed her head, making the fancy bronze earrings she wore clatter softly. She had a necklace of gaudy glass beads and more bronze bangles on her arms. «I to see him, that right,» she said. «They to drag him, they to curse him with their god, they to say Avtokrator to do to him something bad.»
«You are sure this was Tzikas?» Abivard persisted. «Did you hear them say the name?»
She frowned, trying to remember. «I to think maybe,» she said. She wiggled a little and stuck out her backside, perhaps hoping to distract him from her imperfect memory. By the knowing look in her eye, some time as a camp follower probably hadn't taught her much she hadn't already known.
Abivard, however, cared nothing for the charms she so calculatingly flaunted. «Did Maniakes come out and see this captive, whatever his name was?»
«Avtokrator? Yes, he to see him,» Eshkinni said. «Avtokrator, I to think Avtokrator old man. But he not old… not too old. Old like you, maybe.»
«Thank you so much,» Abivard said. Eshkinni nodded as if his gratitude had been genuine. He couldn't be properly sardonic in a language not his own, even if Videssian was made for shades of irony. And he thought she had seen Maniakes; the Avtokrator and Abivard really were about of an age. He tried another question: «What did Maniakes say to the captive?»
«He to say he to give him what he have to come to him,» Eshkinni answered. Abivard frowned, struggling through the freshet of pronouns and infinitives, and then nodded. Had he had Tzikas in front of him, he would have said very much the same thing, though he probably would have elaborated on it a good deal. For that matter, Maniakes might well have elaborated on it; Abivard realized that Eshkinni wasn't giving him a literal translation.
He asked, «Did Maniakes say what he thought Tzikas had coming to him?» He itched to know, an itch partly gleeful, partly guilty
But Eshkinni shook her head. Her earrings clinked again. Her lip curled; she was plainly bored with this whole proceeding. She tugged at her shift not to get rid of the places where it clung to her but to emphasize them. «You to want?» she asked, twitching her hip to leave no possible doubt about what she was offering.
«No, thank you,» Abivard said politely, though he felt like exclaiming, By the God, no! Polite still, he offered an explanation: «My wife is traveling with me.»
«So?» Eshkinni stared at him as if that had nothing to do with anything. In her eyes and in her experience, it probably didn't. She went on. «Why for big fancy man to have only one wife?» She sniffed as an answer occurred to her. «To be same reason you no to want me, I to bet. You no to have beard, I to wonder if you a-» She couldn't come up with the Videssian word for eunuch but made crotch-level cutting motions to show what she meant.
«No,» Abivard said, sharply now. But she had done him a service, so he reached into a pouch he wore on his belt and drew from it twenty silver arkets, which he gave her. Her mood improved on the instant; it was far more than she would have hoped to realize by opening her legs for him.
«You to need to know any more things,» she declared, «you to ask me. I to find out for you, you to best believe I to do.» When she saw Abivard had nothing more to ask her then, she walked off, rolling her haunches. Abivard remained unstirred by the charms thus advertised, but several of his troopers appreciatively followed Eshkinni with their eyes. He suspected she might enlarge upon her earnings.
Later that day he asked Turan, «What would you do if you had Tzikas in your clutches?»
His lieutenant gave a pragmatic answer: «Cast him in irons so he couldn't escape, then get drunk to celebrate.»
Abivard snorted. «Aside from that, I mean.»
«If I found a pretty girl, I might want to get laid, too,» Turan said, and then, grudgingly, seeing the warning on Abivard's face, «I suppose you mean after that. If I were Maniakes, the next thing I'd do would be to squeeze him dry about whatever he'd done while he was here. After that I'd get rid of him, fast if he'd done a good job of singing, slow if he hadn't-or maybe slow on general principles.»
«Yes, that sounds reasonable,» Abivard agreed. «I suspect I'd do much the same myself. Tzikas has it coming, by the God.» He thought for a minute or so. «Now we have to tell Sharbaraz what happened without letting him know we made it happen. Life is never dull.»
He learned how true that was a few days later, when one of his cavalry patrols came across a westbound rider dressed in the light tunic of a man from the land of the Thousand Cities. «He didn't sit his horse quite the way most of the other folk here do, so we thought we'd look him over,» the soldier in charge of the patrol said. «And we found-this.» He held out a leather message tube.
«Did you?» Abivard turned to the captured courier, asking in Videssian, «And what is-this?»
«I don't know,» the courier answered in the same language; he was one of Maniakes' men, sure enough. «All I know is that I was supposed to get through your lines and carry it to Mashiz, then bring back Sharbaraz' answer if he had one.»
«Were you?» Abivard opened the tube. Save for being stamped with the sunburst of Videssos rather than Makuran's lion, it seemed ordinary enough. The rolled-up parchment inside was sealed with scarlet wax, an imperial prerogative. Abivard broke the seal with his thumbnail.
He read Videssian, but haltingly; he moved his lips, sounding out every word. «Maniakes Avtokrator to Sharbaraz King of Kings: Greetings,» the letter began. A string of florid salutations and boasts followed, showing that the Videssians could match the men of Makuran in such excess as well as in war.
After that, though, Maniakes got down to cases faster than most Makuraners would have. In his own hand-which Abivard recognized-he wrote, «I have the honor to inform you that I am holding as a captive and condemned criminal a certain Tzikas, a renegade formerly in your service, whom I had previously condemned. For the capture of this wretch I am indebted to your general Abivard son of Godarz, who, being as vexed by Tzikas' treacheries as I have been myself, arranged to have me capture him and dispose of him. He shall not be missed when he goes, I assure you. He-»
Maniakes went on at some length to explain Tzikas' iniquities.
Abivard didn't read all of them; he knew them too well. He crumpled up the parchment and threw it on the ground, then stared at it in genuine, if grudging, admiration. Maniakes had more gall than even he'd expected. The Avtokrator had used him to help get rid of Tzikas and now was using Sharbaraz to help get rid of him because of Tzikas! If that wasn't effrontery, Abivard didn't know what was.
And only luck had kept the plan from working or at least had delayed it. If the Videssian courier had ridden more like a local-
Abivard picked up the sheet of parchment, unfolded it as well as he could, and summoned Turan. He translated the Videssian for his lieutenant, who did not read the language. When he was through, Turan scowled and said, «May he fall into the Void! What a sneaky thing to do! He-»