“That’s fine,” the tribune said. “I’m glad I had the sense to do the same, with you.” He had learned the warrior’s trade now, but when he joined Caesar in Gaul, he had been a raw political appointee, very much dependent on his senior centurion. Gaius Philippus grunted at the praise. Marcus asked, “How’s Zeprin the Red faring?”

  The veteran grunted again, but with a different intonation. “He still just wants to be a common trooper, worse luck.”

  Marcus shook his head. “Too bad. There’s a good man wasting himself.” The burly Haloga had been a marshal in Mavrikios Gavras’ Imperial Guards, but after he survived Maragha when the Emperor and the rest of the guards regiment were slain he blamed himself and turned his back on officer’s rank. Soldiering was all he knew, but he refused to endanger anyone but himself by his actions.

  “And Pakhymer?” Scaurus asked.

  This time it was a snort from Gaius Philippus. “Pakhymer is—Pakhymer.” The two Romans grinned at each other. Laon Pakhymer’s brigade of light cavalry from Khatrish was not strictly a part of their command, but the two forces had served side by side since the Maragha campaign. Pakhymer’s easy going, catch-as-catch-can style had driven the methodical senior centurion quietly mad all that time. However he did it, though, he generally got results.

  “What else do I need to tell you?” Gaius Philippus said to himself, absently scratching at one of the puckered scars on his right forearm; his left, protected by his scutum, was almost unmarked. He brightened. “Oh, yes—a pair of new underofficers: Pullo and Vorenus.”

  “Both at once, eh?” Marcus asked slyly.

  “Aye, both at once,” Gaius Philippus said, not rising to the tribune’s teasing. “You think I had the ballocks to promote one and not the other?” The two legionaries had fought for years over which made the better soldier, a feud that ended only when they saved each other’s lives in a skirmish with Drax’ Namdaleni.

  “No quarrel, no quarrel,” Scaurus said in some haste. He sighed; the wine he had drunk at Frednis’ was making him low. “Seems you’ve done a splendid job, Gaius. I don’t know why anyone would miss me; you’ve managed everything just as I would have.”

  “Don’t say that, sir!” Gaius Philippus cried, real alarm in his voice. “Begging your pardon, but I wouldn’t have your bloody job on a bet. Oh, I can handle this end of it: who to promote, who to slap down, which march route to pick, how to dress my line. But the rest of it, especially in this mercenary’s game—picking your way through the factions as Thorisin and the pen-pushers square off against each other, knowing when to keep your mouth shut, keeping some shriveled old turd of an officer happy so he doesn’t bugger you the minute you turn your back … Thank the gods the road from the city to Garsavra’s been all over mud what with winter and all, so the damned Videssians weren’t able to pull me eight ways at once.” He threw up his hands. “Take it back, please. We need you for it!”

  It was probably the longest speech Marcus had ever heard him make. Moved, he reached out and clasped the senior centurion’s hand. “Thanks, old friend,” he said softly.

  “For what? The truth?” Gaius Philippus said, outwardly as scornful as ever of any show of emotion. But his hard features could not quite hide his pleasure, and he shuffled his feet awkwardly. He fetched up against the empty jug of wine, which rolled away, bumping on the slightly uneven floor. The veteran followed it with his eyes. “You know,” he said, “that wasn’t nearly enough. We should have more.”

  Marcus swallowed a groan. He was already expecting a thick head, but he could not turn the senior centurion down. Gamely he said, “Why not?” for the second time that evening. Come morning, he knew, he would have his answer, but he went out even so.

  II

  THE ARSHAUM CAMP WOKE WITH THE SUN. SWORDS FLASHED IN THE morning light outside one of the beehive-shaped felt tents; steel rang sweetly against steel. One of the fencers whooped and gave a great roundhouse slash. The other, a smaller man, ducked under it and stepped smartly forward. He stopped his thrust bare inches from his opponent’s chest.

  “To the afterworld with you, you kern,” Viridovix panted, stumbling back and throwing his arms wide in surrender. The Gaul wiped the sweat from his face with a freckled forearm and brushed long coppery hair out of his eyes. “Sure and you must ha’ been practicing on the sly.”

  Gorgidas studied him narrowly. “Are you sure you did not give me that opening?” Physician by training, historian by avocation, the Greek was no skilled swordsman. He had seen too much of war in his medical service with the Roman legions for it to draw him as it did Viridovix. But, having been forced to see he needed a warrior’s skills to survive on the steppe, he set about acquiring them with the same dogged persistence he gave to medical lore.

  The big Celt grinned at him, green eyes crinkling with mirth. “And what if I did? You were after having the wit to take it, which was the point. Not bad, for a man so old and all,” he added, to see Gorgidas fume. Save for the beard the Greek had lately grown, which was streaked all through with white, he might have been any age from twenty-five to sixty; his lean body was full of a surprising spare strength, while his face did not carry much loose flesh to sag with the years.

  “You don’t have to be so bloody proud. You’re no younger than I am,” Gorgidas snapped. Viridovix’ grin got wider. He preened, stroking the luxuriant red mustaches that hung almost to his shoulders. They were still unsilvered. He had scraped off the beard he grew earlier in the winter, but no gray had lurked there either.

  “Boast over what you may,” the Greek said sourly, “but both of us wake up to piss oftener of nights than we did a few years ago, when we were on the lazy side of forty. Deny it if you can.”

  “Och, a hit and no mistake,” Viridovix said. “And here’s another for you!” He sprang at Gorgidas. The physician got his gladius up in time to turn the Gaul’s blow, but it sent the shortsword—a gift from Gaius Philippus, and one he had never thought he’d use—spinning from his hand.

  “Still not bad,” the Celt said, picking it up for him. “I’d meant to spank your ribs with the flat o’ my blade that time.”

  “Bah! I should have held on.” Gorgidas opened and closed his fist several times, working flexibility into his numbed fingers. “You have a heavy arm there, you hulking savage.” He was too honest not to give praise where it was due, though his sharp tongue diluted it in the giving.

  “Well, may you be staked out for the corbies, scoffer of a Greekling.” Viridovix swelled with mock indignation. Between themselves they spoke a bastard mix of Latin and Videssian. Each was the only representative of his people in this new world and each felt the pain of his own language slowly dying in him for want of anyone with whom to speak it. Gorgidas kept Greek alive by composing his history in that tongue. But only druids wrote the Celtic speech, so Viridovix was denied even that relief.

  Around them the camp was coming to life. Some nomads were tending to their small, shaggy horses while others knocked down tents and rolled the fabric up around the sticks that formed their frameworks. Still more crouched round fires as they breakfasted; the morning was chilly. They mixed water with dry curds and spooned up the thick, soupy, tasteless mix; gnawed at slabs of salted and dried beef, mutton, goat, or venison; or speared horsegut-cased sausages on sticks and roasted them over the flames. Many of them did not have as much as they wanted; supplies were running low.

  Mounted sentries trotted in from the perimeter, rubbing at eyes red and tired from their sleepless duty. Others rode out to take their place. The Arshaum grumbled at the tight watch their khagan Arghun kept. What if they were on the plains of Pardraya, east of the river Shaum, instead of in their own steppelands to the west? Their ancestors had smashed the Khamorth over the river to Pardraya half a century before; few believed the rival nomad folk would dare contest their passage.

  For all that, though, the Arshaum were men who enjoyed fighting for its own sake, and Gorgidas and Viridovix were not alone in weapons play. Plainsmen thrust light lances and flung javelins both afoot and mounted. They fired arrows at wadded balls of cloth tossed into the air and at shields propped upright on the ground. Their double-curved bows, reinforced with sinew, sent barbed shafts smashing through the small, round targets—shafts that could pierce a corselet of boiled leather or chain mail afterwards.

  A bowstring snapped just as an archer let fly, sending his arrow spinning crazily through the air. “Heads up!” the Arshaum yelled, and all around him nomads dove for cover.

  “Why does he go shouting that, the which would do a man no good at all?” Viridovix said. “Riddle it out for me, Gorgidas dear.”

  “He must have meant it especially for you, you unruly Celt,” the physician replied with relish, “knowing you always do the opposite of whatever you’re told.”

  “Honh! See if I’m fool enough to be asking for another explanation from you any time soon.”

  Not far away, a plainsman thudded into the dirt, flung over his wrestling partner’s shoulder; the Arshaum were highly skilled at unarmed combat. Their swordplay was less expert. Several pairs slashed away at each other with the medium-length curved blades they favored. The yataghans, heavy at the point, were all very well for quick cuts from horseback, but did not lend themselves to scientific fencing.

  “Had enough?” Gorgidas asked, sheathing his sword.

  “Aye, for the now.”

  They wandered over to watch one of the dueling pairs, perhaps the unlikeliest match in the camp. Arghun’s son Arigh was going at it furiously with Batbaian, the son of Targitaus, their blades a silvery glitter as they met each other stroke for stroke.

  They were both khagans’ sons, but there their resemblance ended. For looks, Arigh was a typical enough Arshaum: slender, lithe, and swarthy, with a wide, high-cheekboned face, short, almost flat nose, and slanted eyes. Only a few black hairs grew on his upper lip and straggled down from the point of his chin. But Batbaian was a Khamorth, with his people’s broad-shouldered frame, thick curly beard half hiding his heavy features, and a strong, fleshy beak in the center of his face. He would have been handsome but for the red ruin of a socket where his left eye had been.

  The eye he still had was the “mercy” of Avshar and Varatesh the bandit chief. They had taken a thousand prisoners when they crushed the army Targitaus raised against them, and then given those prisoners back to Batbaian’s father … all but fifty of them with both eyes burned away, the rest left with one to guide their comrades home. Seeing them so ravaged, Targitaus died of a stroke on the spot. Varatesh fell on his devastated clan three days later. As far as Viridovix knew, Batbaian was the only clansman left alive—save himself, whom Targitaus had adopted into the Wolves after he escaped Varatesh and his henchmen. The bandits missed them only because they were attending an outlying herd; they rode in at day’s end to find massacre laid out before them.

  The Gaul’s features, usually merry, grew grim and tight as he fell into memory’s grip. Batbaian had had a sister—but Seirem was dead now, and perhaps that was as well, with what she met before she died. Part of Viridovix’ heart was dead with her; a tomcat by nature, he had come late to love and lost it too early.

  The past winter he and Batbaian had lived the outlaw’s life, revenge their only goal. At last he thought to cross west into Shaumkhiil and seek aid from the Arshaum against Varatesh and Avshar, his puppet-master. Batbaian’s hate burned away his fear of the western nomads; where the Arshaum despised the Khamorth, the latter had almost a superstitious dread for the folk who had harried them east over the steppe.

  Having traveled with the Arshaum force for weeks, though, Batbaian saw that they were men, too, not the near-demons he had thought. And he had earned their respect as well, for the hardships he had borne and for his skill with his hands. His burly build let him shoot farther than most of them, and if he was now giving ground to Arigh, his foe was fast and deceptive as a striking snake.

  “The wind-spirits take it!” he cursed in his own guttural tongue, falling back again. In a mixture of bad Videssian—which Arigh understood, having served his father as envoy to the Empire—and worse Arshaum, he went on, “With only eye one, not able to tell how away far you are.”

  Arigh’s grin was predatory, his teeth very white. “My friend, Varatesh’s men would not heed your whining, and I will not either.”

  He pressed his attack, his slashes coming from every direction at once. Then he was staring at his empty hand; his sword lay on the ground at his feet. Batbaian leaped forward and planted a boot on it. He tapped Arigh on the chest with his blade. The watchers whooped at the sudden reversal.

  “Why you dirty son of a flop-eared goat,” Arigh said without much rancor. “You suckered me into that, didn’t you?”

  Batbaian only grunted. The summer before he had been hardly more than a boy, full of a boy’s chatter and bubbling enthusiasm for everything around him. These days he was a man, and a driven one. He spoke seldom, and his smile, which was rarer, never reached past his lips.

  “Puir lad,” Viridovix murmured to Gorgidas. “A pity you canna unfreeze the spirit of him, as you did wi’ this carcass o’ mine.”

  “I know no gift for that, save it come from within a man’s own soul,” the physician answered. Then he spread his hands and admitted, “For that matter, when I found you I thought I would have to watch you die, too.”

  “A good thing you didn’t. My ghost’d bewail you for it.”

  “Hmm. No doubt, if it takes after you in the flesh.” But the Greek could not stay flippant long, not where the healing he had worked on Viridovix was concerned.

  Ever since he was swept into Videssos with the legionaries, he had studied its healing art, an art that relied not so much on herbs and scalpels as on mustering and unleashing the power of the mind to beat back disease and injury—call it magic, for lack of a better word. He had seen Phos’ healer-priests work cures on men he had given up for doomed, and chased after their skill like a hunter trailing some elusive beast.

  But the stubborn rationality on which he prided himself would not let him truly accept that curing by mind alone was possible; it ran too much against all his training, all his deepest beliefs. And so for years he tried and, not genuinely believing he could succeed, never did. Only the lash of desperation at finding Viridovix freezing in a fierce steppe blizzard made him transcend his doubts and channel the healing energies through himself and into the Gaul.

  He had healed again afterwards, closing and cleansing the bites an Arshaum took from a wolf that would not die with three arrows in its chest. Knowing he could heal made the second time easy. The nomad’s gratitude was wine-sweet, and the Greek accepted as a badge of honor the tearing weariness that always followed healing.

  “Why for we standing round?” Batbaian demanded. “We should riding be.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned away from Arigh and went off to his string of horses to pick a mount for the day’s ride.

  Behind him, Arigh shook his head. “That one would ride through fire for his revenge.”

  The Arshaum around him nodded, sympathizing with Batbaian’s blood feud. But Viridovix started in alarm, whipping his head round to make sure the Khamorth had not heard the remark. “Dinna say that to him, ever,” he warned. “ ’Twas Avshar’s fires trapped him in the shindy, and all the rest, too.” The Gaul shuddered as he remembered those tall, arrow-straight lines of flame darting like serpents over the steppe at the evil wizard’s will.

  There was compassion under the unfeeling veneer Arigh cultivated, though he often did not let it out. Even when he did, it was usually with a self-deprecating, “All that time in Videssos has left me soft.” But now he bit his lip, admitting, “I’d forgotten.”

  A last delay held up the army’s departure a few minutes more. All the tents were down and stowed on horseback save the one shared by Lankinos Skylitzes and Pikridios Goudeles, Thorisin’s envoys to Arghun. Skylitzes was long since out and about; the tall imperial officer looked with dour amusement at the sign of his tentmate’s sleepiness.

  He stuck his head inside the tent and roared, “Up, slugabed! Is this a holy day, for you to spend it all between the sheets?”

  Goudeles emerged in short order, but mightily rumpled, tunic on back-to-front, and belt out of half its loops. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, the pen-pusher winced at the ironic cheer that greeted his appearance. “Oh, very well, here I am,” he said testily. He glowered at Skylitzes; the two of them were as cat and dog. “Mightn’t you have picked a less drastic way to rouse me?”

  “No,” Skylitzes said. He was that rarity, a short-spoken Videssian.

  Still grumbling, Goudeles began to knock down the tent, but made such a slow, clumsy job of it that Skylitzes, with an exasperated grunt, finally pitched in to help. “You bungler,” he said, almost kindly, as he tied the roll of tent fabric and sticks onto a packsaddle.

  “Bungler? I?” Goudeles drew himself up to his full height, which was not imposing. “No need to mock me merely because I was not cut out for life in the field.” He caught Gorgidas’ eye. “These soldiers have a narrow view of life’s priorities, do they not?”

  “No doubt,” the Greek answered. As he was already mounted, he sounded a trifle smug. Goudeles looked hurt, one of his more artful expressions. In truth, the bureaucrat was a carpet knight, infinitely more at home in the elaborate double-dealing of Videssos the city than here on the vast empty steppe. But his gift for intrigue made him a sly, subtle diplomat, and he had done well in helping persuade Arghun to favor the Empire over Yezd.

  He spent a few seconds trying to restore the point to his beard, but gave it up as a bad job. “Hopeless,” he said sadly. He climbed onto his own horse and patted his belly, still ample after close to a year on the plains. “Am I too late to break my fast?”

  Skylitzes rolled his eyes, but Viridovix handed Goudeles a chunk of meat. The pen-pusher eyed it skeptically. “What, ah, delicacy have we here?”