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were also helping to turn
Maniakes loose on their land once more. He kept quiet. From long, often
unhappy experience, he knew a peasant's horizon seldom reached farther than
the crop he was raising. There was some justification for that way of
thinking, too: if the crop didn't get raised nothing else mattered, not to the
peasant who stood to starve.
But Abivard saw farther. If Maniakes got loose to rampage over the land
between the Tutub and the Tib once more, these particular peasants might
escape, but others, probably more, would suffer.
He found himself glancing at the sun more often than usual. Like anyone else,
he looked to the sky to find out what time it was. Nowadays, though, he paid
more attention to where in the sky the sun was rising and setting. The sooner
autumn came, the happier he would be. Maniakes would have to withdraw to his
own land men...
wouldn't he?
If he did intend to withdraw, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he sent out
horsemen to harass Abivard's soldiers and slow their already creeping advance
even further.
With Abivard's reluctant blessing, Tzikas led his cavalry regiment in a
counterattack that sent the Videssians back in retreat.
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When the renegade tried to push farther still, he barely escaped an ambush
Maniakes' troopers set for him. On hearing that, Abivard didn't know whether
to be glad or sorry. Seeing Tzikas fall into the hands of the Avtokrator he'd
tried to slay by sorcery would have been the perfect revenge on him even if
Abivard had decided not to hand him over to Maniakes.
"Why can't you?" Turan asked when Abivard grumbled about that "I wish you
would have after he came down here, no matter what he said about his
regiment." He paused thoughtfully. "The cursed Videssian's not a coward in
battle, whatever else you want to say about him. Arrange for him to meet about
a regiment's worth of
Videssians with maybe half a troop of his own at his back. That'll settle him
once and for all."
Abivard pondered the idea. It brought a good deal of temptation with it. In
the end, though, and rather to his own surprise, he shook his head. "It's what
he would do to me were our places reversed."
"All the more reason to do it to him first," Turan said.
"Thank you, but no. If you have to become a villain to beat a villain, the God
will drop you into the Void along with him."
"You're too tenderhearted for your own good," Turan said. "Sharbaraz King of
Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, would have done it without
blinking an eye, and he wouldn't have needed me to suggest it to him, either."
That was both true and false. Sharbaraz, these days, could be as ruthless as
any man ever born when it came to protecting his throne... yet he had not put
Abivard out of the way when he had had the chance. Maybe that meant a spark of
humanity did still lurk within the kingly facade he'd been building over the
past decade and more.
Turan looked sly. "If you want to keep your hands clean, lord, I expect I
could arrange something or other. You don't even have to ask. I'll take care
of it."
Abivard shook his head again, this time in annoyance. If Turan had quietly
arranged for Tzikas' untimely demise without telling him about it, that would
have been between his lieutenant and the God. But for Turan to do that after
Abivard had said he didn't want it done was a different matter. What would
have been good service would have turned into villainy.
"You've got more scruples than a druggist," Turan grumbled as he walked off,
as
disappointed with Abivard as Abivard was with him.
The next day Tzikas returned to camp to give Abivard the details of his
skirmish with the Videssians. "The enemy, at least, thought I was a man of
Makuran," he said pointedly. " 'There's that cavalry general of theirs, curse
him to the ice,' they said. A
good many of them have fallen into the Void now, eternal oblivion their fate."
He said all the right things. He'd let his beard grow out so that it made his
face seem more rectangular, less pinched in at the jaw and chin. He wore a
Makuraner caftan. And he still was, to Abivard, a foreigner, a Videssian, and
so not to be trusted because of who he was, let alone because of his letters
to Sharbaraz King of Kings.
But he'd done decent service here. Abivard acknowledged that, saying, "I'm
glad you beat them back. Knowing a cavalry regiment is here and able to do its
job will make Maniakes think twice about getting pushy so late in the year."
"Yes," Tzikas said. "Your magic helped there, too, even if not quite so much
as you'd hoped." His lips twisted in a grimace no Makuraner could have [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]