«You must know, your Majesty, that direct contact is necessary for this healing to succeed,» he said. «Yes, of course,» Maniakes said.

He was not sure whether Philetos heard him or not. «We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind,» the healer-priest intoned, «by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.» Philetos repeated the formula again and again, partly as a prayer, partly as a tool to lift himself out of his usual state of consciousness and onto the higher plane where healing might take place.

The moment when he reached that other plane was easy enough to sense. He seemed to quiver and then grow very firmly planted on the ground, as if fixed there by a power stronger than any merely mortal. Maniakes, standing a few feet away, felt the current of healing pass from Philetos to the wounded soldier, though he could not have said with which of his senses he felt it. He sketched the sun-circle and murmured Phos' creed himself, filled with awe at the power for which Philetos was the conduit.

The healer-priest grunted. All at once, his eyes focused on the merely mundane world once more. He took his hands away from the arrow wound and wiped them on the soldier's tunic, then used the tunic to scrub away the rest of the blood on the man's chest. Instead of a hole through which more blood came, only a white, puckered scar remained there, as if the fellow had suffered the injury years before.

He opened his eyes and looked up at Philetos. «Holy sir?» he said in tones of surprise. His voice might have been that of any young man, certainly not that of a young man who had just taken an arrow in the lung. Memory filled his face with pain, or rather with the recollection of pain. «I was shot. I fell. I couldn't breathe.» His eyes widened as he realized what must have happened. «You healed me, holy sir?»

«Through me, the good god healed you.» Philetos' voice came out as a harsh croak. His face was haggard, the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones. «Phos was kind to you, lad.» He managed a weary chuckle. «Try not to stop any more arrows with your chest, eh?»

«Yes, holy sir.» The soldier, at the point of death a few minutes earlier, scrambled to his feet. «Phos bless you.» He hurried away; but for the blood still round his mouth and nose, no one would have known he'd been hurt.

Philetos, by contrast, looked about to fall over. Maniakes had seen that reaction in healer-priests before; using their talent drained them dry. The Avtokrator snouted for food and wine. Philetos gobbled and gulped, downing enough for two ordinary men. Maniakes had seen that before, too.

«Where is the next one?» the healer-priest said, still wearily but with some restored vigor. A healer-priest of extraordinary talent, such as he was, could heal two, three, sometimes even four men who would have died without his attentions. After that, the effort grew too great, and the would-be healer collapsed before being able to establish the conduit with the force that flowed through him.

«You don't want to kill yourself, you know,» Maniakes told him. «I've heard that can happen if you push yourself too hard.»

«Where is the next one?» Philetos repeated, taking no notice of him. But when no answer was immediately forthcoming, the healer-priest went on, «Because we can do so little, your Majesty, honor demands we do all we can. The healing art is a growing thing; heal-as of my generation can do more at less cost to themselves than was so in my great-grandfather's day, as surviving chronicles and texts on the art make plain. In days to come, as research continues, those who follow us will accomplish still more.»

«Which is all very well,» Maniakes said, «but which doesn't keep you from killing yourself if you do too much.»

«I shall do all I can. If I die, it is as Phos wills,» Philetos answered. He suddenly looked not just exhausted but thoroughly grim. «As is also true of those whom we try but fail to heal.»

That made Maniakes' mouth twist, too. Philetos had tried to heal his first wife, Niphone, after she'd had to be cut open to allow Likarios to be born. She'd been on the point of death when the surgery was attempted, but Philetos still blamed himself for failing to bring her back.

«You don't work miracles,» the Avtokrator said.

Philetos dismissed that with a wave of his hand, as if it weren't worth refuting. «What I do, your Majesty, is I work, with no qualifiers tacked onto the end of it.» His head went this way and that, taking in as much of the field as he could, looking for one more man he might restore to vigor before his own strength failed him.

«Healer!» Faint in the distance, the cry rose. Someone—maybe a surgeon, maybe just a soldier out for loot—had come across a wounded man the special power of the healer-priests might save.

«By your leave, your Majesty,» Philetos said. But he wasn't really asking leave; he was telling Maniakes he was leaving. And leave he did, at a dogged trot. He might have been tired unto death, he might have been courting it himself—perhaps to make amends for Niphone and the rest of his failures—but he would fight it in others as long as he had breath in him.

Maniakes watched him go. He could have ordered the healer-priest to stop and rest. One thing he had learned, though: the most useless order was one given without any hope of its being obeyed.

«Let's see,» Ypsilantes said, peering across the Tib at the foot soldiers on the western bank, «weren't we here a few days ago?»

«I think we might have been,» Maniakes said. «Something or other interrupted us, though, or we'd have been busy trying to cross by now.»

Both men laughed. Their humor had a touch of the macabre to it; the air was thick with the stench of corruption from the battle Maniakes had offhandedly called something or other, as if he couldn't remember why the attempted crossing had been delayed. He suspected Makuraners and Kubratoi cracked those same jokes. If you wanted to stay in your right mind, you had to.

Ypsilantes made a clucking noise that put Maniakes in mind of a chicken examining a caterpillar trying to decide whether it was one that tasted good or one of the horrid kind. «I don't quite like the way the river looks,» the chief engineer said. «It might have one more flood surge left in it.»

«So late in the year?» Maniakes said. «I can't believe that.»

«It would be more likely if we were talking about the Tutub,» Ypsilantes admitted. «You can't trust the Tutub. But I think the Tib here is fuller in its banks and has bigger ripples than a couple of days ago.»

Maniakes examined the Tib. «Looks remarkably like a river to me,» he said, thereby showing the extent of his professional knowledge.

«It's a river, all right, and any river can be trouble,» Ypsilantes said. «I'd hate to try to cross and have our bridge and such swept away with half the army on this side of the river and the other half on that one.»

«Could be embarrassing,» Maniakes agreed, again with that dry lack of emphasis: he might not have been a professional engineer, but he was a professional soldier, and, like a lot of men in that calling, used language that minimized the sorts of things that might happen to him.

«Maybe we should wait a few days before we go looking to cross,» Ypsilantes said. «Hate to say that—»

«I hate to hear it, too,» Maniakes broke in. «We've already had to wait longer than I would have liked, what with having to forage for timber and boats, and what with the attack the Makuraners brought home on us.»

Ypsilantes' jaw tightened. «I own, your Majesty, I don't know for certain the river is going to rise. If you want to say I'm being a foolish old woman and order me to go ahead, no one can tell you you're wrong. You're the Avtokrator. Tell me to move and I'll obey.»