By the standards with which Abivard had become familiar while living in Vek Rud domain, Mashiz enjoyed a mild winter. It was chilly, but even the winds off the Dilbat Mountains were nothing like the ones that blew around Vek Rud stronghold. Those seemed to take a running start on the Pardrayan steppe and to blow right through a man because going around him was too much trouble.

  They got mild days in Mashiz, as opposed to the endless, bone-numbing chill of the far Northwest. Every so often the wind would shift and blow off the land of the Thousand Cities. Whenever it did that for two days running, Abivard began to think spring had arrived at last. He could taste how eager he was for good weather that wasn't just a tease of the sort a dancing girl would give to a soldier who lusted after her but whom she wanted to annoy rather than bed.

  As the sun swung northward from its low point in the sky, the mild days gradually came more often. But every time Abivard's hopes began to rise with the sap in the trees, a new storm would claw its way over the mountains and freeze those hopes once more.

  Abivard did send messages both to the field army, ordering it to ready to move out when the weather permitted, and to Turan, ordering him to prepare to defend the land of the Thousand Cities with foot soldiers from the city garrisons alone. He did not go into more detail than that in his message. In peacetime the Thousand Cities had a flourishing trade with Videssos. That news of what he intended might reach the Avtokrator struck him as far from impossible.

  Varaz knew what Sharbaraz intended. He had even less patience than Abivard, being wild to leave the foothills for the flatlands to the east, the flatlands that were the gateway to Videssos. "You need to wait," his father told him. "Leaving too soon doesn't get us anywhere—or not soon enough, anyhow."

  "I'm sick of waiting!" Varaz burst out, a sentiment with which Abivard had more than a little sympathy. "I've spent the last three winters waiting here in the palace. I want to get out, to get away. I want to go to the places where things will happen."

  Pretty soon, Abivard thought, Varaz would be old enough to make things happen rather than just watching them happen. He was taller than his mother now. Before long, his beard would begin to grow and he would make the discovery every generation finds astounding: that mankind includes womankind and is much more interesting on account of it.

  Abivard hadn't cared for being cooped up three winters running, either, even if conditions had improved from one winter to the next. He had borne it more easily than had his son, though. But Varaz was going to escape from Mashiz, to return first to the land of the Thousand Cities, then to Across, and then, if the God was willing, to enter Videssos the city.

  "Count yourself lucky," Abivard told his elder son. "Your cousin Jarireh may never leave the palace till the day she marries."

  "She's a girl, though," Varaz said. Had Roshnani heard the tone in which he said it, she probably would have boxed his ears. He went on, "Besides, her baby brother's going to be King of Kings."

  "That won't help her get out and see the world—or at least I don't think it will," Abivard said. "It will make picking someone for her to marry harder than it would be, though."

  "Marriage—so what?" Varaz said, nothing but scorn in his voice—he remained on the childish side of the great divide. "Your family picks someone for you, the two of you go before the servant of the God, and that's it. That's how it works most of the time, anyhow."

  "Are you making an exception for your mother and me?" Abivard asked dryly.

  "Well, yes, but the two of you are different," Varaz said. "Mother goes out and does things, almost as if she were a man; she doesn't stay in the women's quarters all the time. And you let her."

  "No," Abivard said. "I don't 'let' her. I'm glad she does. In a number of ways she's more clever than I am. I'm only lucky in that I'm clever enough to see she is more clever."

  "I don't follow that," Varaz said. He quickly held up a hand. "I probably wouldn't follow it in Videssian, either, no matter how logical it's supposed to be, so don't bother trying."

  Thus forestalled, Abivard threw his hands in the air. Varaz escaped from his presence and went dashing down a palace hallway. Watching him, Abivard sighed. No, waiting was never easy.

  But even Sharbaraz had been forced to wait for his ambassadors to return. In another sense he'd had to wait more than a dozen years after the Empire of Videssos had fallen into civil strife to be able to assail its capital with any hope of success. In still another sense Makuran as a whole had been waiting centuries for this opportunity to come around.

  Abivard snapped his fingers. Lands didn't wait—people did. And, like his son, he was very tired of waiting.

  Pashang clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The wagon rattled away from Mashiz. Abivard rode beside it on a fine black gelding, the gift of Sharbaraz King of Kings. Romezan rode another that might have been a different foal of the same mare.

  Around them, almost as splendidly mounted, trotted a company of heavy cavalry, their armor and that of their horses stowed in carts or on packhorses since they were traveling through friendly territory and were not expecting to fight. One proud young horseman carried the red war banner.

  Off to one side, with the group but not of it, rode Tzikas.

  Abivard had been warned of all the horrid things that would happen to him if anything at all happened to Tzikas. He was still trying to work out whether those horrid things were deterrent enough. For the moment they probably were. Once Videssos the city fell, Tzikas would be expendable. And if by some misfortune Videssos the city failed to fall, Sharbaraz would be looking for a scapegoat.

  Tzikas no doubt was thinking along similar lines. Abivard glanced over toward him and wasn't surprised to find the Videssian renegade's eyes already on him. He stared at Tzikas for a little while, nothing but challenge in his gaze. Tzikas looked back steadily. Abivard let out a silent sigh. Enemies were so much easier to despise when they were cowards. Yet even though Tzikas was no coward, Abivard despised him anyhow.

  He turned in the saddle and said to Romezan, "We're riding in the right direction now."

  "How do you mean that?" Romezan returned. "Away from the palace? Out into the field? Toward the war?"

  "Any of those will do," Abivard said. "They'll all do." If he had to pick one, away from the palace probably would fit his thought best. In the palace he was slave to the King of Kings, for all his achievements hardly higher in status than sweepers or captive Videssian pedagogues. Away from the palace, away from the King of Kings, he was a marshal of Makuran, a great power in his own right. He had grown very used to that, all those years he'd spent extending the power of Makuran through the Videssian westlands till it reached the Cattle Crossing. Being yanked back under Sharbaraz' control would have been hard on him even had the King of Kings not seen treason lurking under every pillow and behind every door.

  Romezan did not dwell on the past. He looked ahead to the cast. Dreamily, he said, "Do you suppose we'll lay Videssos low? How many hundred years have they and we warred? Come this fall, will the fight be over at last?"

  "If the God is kind," Abivard answered. They rode on a while in silence. Then Abivard said, "We'll muster as far forward as we can. As soon as we have word that Maniakes has landed, whether down in Lyssaion or in Erzerum, we move."

  "What if he doesn't land?" Romezan said, looking eastward gain, as if he could span the farsangs and see into the palaces in distant Videssos the city. "What if he decides to stay home for a year? Maniakes never ends up doing what we think he will."

  That was true. Even so, Abivard shook his head. "He'll come," be said. "I'm sure of it, and Sharbaraz was dead right to assume it." Hearing him agree so emphatically with the King of Kings was enough to make Romezan dig a finger into his ear as if to make sure it was working as it should. Chuckling, Abivard went on. "What's Maniakes' chief advantage over us?" He answered his own question: "He commands the sea. What has he been doing with that command? He's been using it to take the war out of Videssos and into the realm of the King of Kings. How can he possibly afford not to keep on doing what he's done the past two years?"

  "Put that way, I don't suppose he can," Romezan admitted.

  "The real beauty of Sharbaraz' scheme—" Abivard stopped. Now he wondered if he was really talking about the King of Kings that way. He was, and in fact he repeated himself: "The real beauty of Sharbaraz' plan is that it uses Maniakes' strengths against him and Videssos. He takes his ships, uses them to bring his army back to the land of the Thousand Cities, and gets embroiled in fighting well away from the sea. And while he's doing all that, we steal a march and take his capital away from him."

  Romezan thought for a while before nodding. "I like it."

  "So do I," Abivard said.

  "He liked it better by the day. He and his escort made their way through the land of the Thousand Cities toward Qostabash. Peasants were busy in the fields, bringing in the spring harvest. Here and there, though, they were busy at other things, most notably the repair of canals wrecked in the previous fall's fighting and soon to be needed to cope with the sudden rush of water from the spring floods of the Tutub and the Tib and their tributaries. And here and there, across the green quilt of the floodplain, fields went untended, unharvested. Some of the cities that had perched on mounds of their own rubble were now nothing but rubble themselves. Maniakes had made the land of the Thousand Cities pay a terrible price for the many victories Makuran had won in Videssos over the past decade.

  Whenever he stopped at one of the surviving Thousand Cities, Abivard examined how well the city governor had kept up the local garrison. He was pleased to find most of those garrisons in better shape than they had been two years earlier, when the Videssians had first entered the floodplain. Before then both city governorships and slots in the city garrison had been the nearest thing to sinecures: but for flood or drought, what ever went wrong among the Thousand Cities? Invasion was not an answer that seemed to have occurred beforehand to many people.

  Romezan paid the revived city garrisons what might have been the ultimate compliment when he said, "You know, I wouldn't mind taking a few thousand of these foot soldiers along with us when we go into the Videssian westlands. They really can fight. Who would have thought it?"

  "That's not what you said when you came to my aid last summer," Abivard reminded him.

  "I know," Romezan answered. "I hadn't seen them in action then. I was wrong. I admit it You deserve a lot of credit for turning them into soldiers."

  Abivard shook his head. "Do you know who deserves the credit for turning them into soldiers?"

  "Turan?" Romezan snorted dismissively. "He's done well with them, aye, but he's still only a jumped-up captain learning how to be a general."

  "He's done very well, as a matter of fact, but I wasn't thinking of him," Abivard answered. "The one who deserves the credit for turning them into soldiers is Maniakes. Without him they'd just be the same swaggering bullies they've been for the God only knows how many years. But that doesn't work, not against the Videssians. The ones who are still alive know better now."

  "Something to that, I expect," Romezan said after a reflective pause.

  "It's also one reason why we're not going to take any of those foot soldiers into Videssos," Abivard said. Romezan's dark, bushy brows pulled down and together in confusion. Abivard explained: "Remember, we want the Videssians heavily engaged here in the land of the Thousand Cities. That means we're going to have to leave behind a good-sized army to fight them, an army with good fighting men in it. Either we leave behind a piece of the field army—"

  "No, by the God!" Romezan broke in.

  Abivard held up a placatory hand. "I agree. The field army is the best Makuran has. That's what we send against Videssos the city, which will need the best we have. But the next best we have has to stay here to keep Maniakes in play while we move against the city."

  Again Romezan paused for thought before answering. "This is a tricky business, gauging all the separate strengths to make sure each is in the proper place. Me, I'd sooner point my mass of troops at the foe, charge him straight on, and smash him down into the dirt."

  "I know," Abivard said, which was true. He added, "So would I," which was less true. "But Maniakes fights like a Videssian, so stealth makes do for a lot of his strength. If we're going to beat the Empire so it stays beaten, we have to do it his way."

  "I suppose so," Romezan said unwillingly. "But if we fight like the Videssians, we'll end up acting like them in other ways, too. And they know no caste."

  He spoke with great abhorrence. Abivard knew he should have felt that same abhorrence. Try as he would, he couldn't find it inside himself. He wondered why. After a few seconds' thought he said, "I've lived so long in Videssos and here in the Thousand Cities, I don't mind that nearly so much as I used to. Up on the Plateau breaking people into tight groups—the King of Kings, the Seven Clans and the servants of the God, the dihqans, artisans and merchants, and peasants down at the bottom—seemed a natural thing to do. Now I've seen other ways of doing things, and I realize ours isn't the only one."

  "That's no sort of thing for a proper Makuraner to say." Romezan sounded almost as dismayed as if Abivard had blasphemed the God.

  But Abivard refused to let himself be cowed. "No, eh? Why is it you kiss my cheek, then, instead of the other way around? You outrank me. I'm just a dihqan, and a frontier dihqan at that."

  "I started giving you that courtesy because you're brother-in-law to the King of Kings," the noble from the Seven Clans answered. If he'd kept quiet after that, he would have won the argument. Instead, though, he went on, "Now I see you've earned it because—"

  Abivard stuck a triumphant finger in the air. "If you grant me the courtesy because I've earned it and not because of my blood, what has that got to do with caste?"

  Romezan started to answer, looked confused, stopped, and tried again: "It's—that is—" He came to another stop, then burst out, "You have lived among the Videssians too long. All you want to do is chop logic all day. Now I'm going to be thinking for the next half dozen farsangs." He made the prospect sound most unpleasant. Abivard had seen that before in many different men. It always left him sad.

  Tzikas, on the other hand, actively enjoyed thinking. That wasn't necessarily a recommendation, either. The older Abivard got, the more it looked as if nothing was necessarily a recommendation for anything.

  Outside Qostabash men from the field army were playing mallet and ball, galloping their horses up and down a grassy stretch of ground with great abandon. Every so often a loincloth-clad peasant, his blue-black hair bound in a bun at the nape of his neck, would look up from his labor with hoe and mattock and watch the sport for a little while before bending back down to weed or prune or dig. Abivard wondered what the peasants thought of the shouting warriors whose game was not far from combat itself. Whatever it was, they kept it to themselves.

  He had sent a rider out ahead of his company to let Turan know he was near. Two years before Turan had been only a company commander himself. He'd risen fast, since Abivard had access to so few veteran Makuraner officers on whom he could rely. Now Turan had shown himself able to command an army. Very soon he'd have the chance to do just that

  Now he came riding out of Qostabash to greet Abivard and his companions—he must have had men up on the walls of the city keeping an eye out for them. The first thing he did after pulling his horse alongside Abivard's was to point over at Tzikas and say, "Isn't he supposed to be dead, lord?"

  "It all depends on whom you ask," Abivard answered. "I certainly think so, but the King of Kings disagrees. As in any contest of that sort, his will prevails."

  "Of course it does," Turan said, as any loyal Makuraner would have done. Then, as anyone who had made the acquaintance of Tzikas would have done, he asked, "Why on earth does he want him alive?"

  "For a reason even I find... fairly good," Abivard answered. He spent the next little while explaining the plan Sharbaraz King of Kings had devised and the places his sovereign had designated for him and for the Videssian renegade.

  When he was through, Turan glanced over at Tzikas and said, "He had better make keeping him alive worth everyone's while or else he won't last, orders from the King of Kings or no orders from the King of Kings."

  "Far be it from me to argue with you," Abivard said. Lowering his voice, he went on, "But I've decided I'm not going to do anything about it till after Videssos the city falls, if it does. Either way, the problem takes care of itself then." He explained his reasoning to Turan.

  The officer nodded. "Aye, lord, that's very good. If we fail, which the God forbid, he gets the blame, and if we succeed, we don't need him anymore after that. Very neat. Anyone would think you were the Videssian, not his unpleasantness over there."

  "Too many people have said the same thing to me lately," Abivard grumbled. "I thank the God and the Prophets Four that I'm not"

  "Aye, I believe that," Turan agreed, "the same as I thank the God—" He broke off. He'd probably been about to say something like for making me a man, not a woman. Considering how much freedom Roshnani had and how well she used it, that wasn't the wisest thing to say around Abivard. Turan changed the subject: "How will you know, lord, when to leave the Thousand Cities behind and strike out for Videssos?"

  "As soon as we get word Maniakes has landed, whether north or south, we go," Abivard said. "At this season of the year the badlands between the Thousand Cities and Videssos will have some greenery on them, too, which means we won't have to carry quite so much grain and hay for the horses and mules."

  "Every little bit helps," Turan said. "And you'll want me to keep Maniakes in play for as long as I can, isn't that right?"

  "The busier he is with you, the more time I'll have to do all I can against Videssos the city," Abivard said, and Turan nodded. Abivard added, "You may even beat him—who knows?"