«No, thank you,» Lysia said at once, her voice sharp. «I know that sounds very grand, but I don't care. I want to go home to have this baby. If we go home after we've beaten the Makuraners, that's wonderful—better than wonderful, in fact. But beating the Makuraners isn't reason enough for me to want to stay here. If you decide to do that, well and good. Send me back to Videssos the city.»

In marriage as in war, knowing when to retreat was not the least of virtues. «I'll do that,» Maniakes promised. He scratched at his beard while he thought. «Meanwhile, though, I have to figure out how to arrange the triumph after which I get to send you home.» He snapped his fingers. «Should be easy, shouldn't it?» Lysia laughed. So did he.

For the next few days, Maniakes wondered whether he had magical powers to put those of Bagdasares to shame. One snap of the fingers seemed to have been plenty to rout all the opposition the Makuraners had mustered against his men. The foot soldiers, who had put up such a persistent fight for so long, now began melting away rather than resisting as they had.

Every now and then, some of them would try to hold back the Videssians, while others broke canals open. But these men seldom stood in place as the other, larger, force west of the Tib had done so often over the past couple of years; it was as if his crossing the river had taken the spirit out of them.

And opening the canals was less effective west of the Tib than it had been in the heart of the Land of the Thousand Cities. As was true east of the Tutub, there was land beyond that which the network of canals irrigated. Instead of having to slog through fields made all but impassable by water and mud, the Videssians simply wait around them, and once or twice scooped up good-sized bands of foes in the process.

Far more easily than Maniakes had imagined possible, his men neared the approaches to Mashiz. There their advance slowed. The usurper Smerdis had fortified those approaches against Sharbaraz. Once Sharbaraz won the civil war between them and became King of Kings himself, he'd rebuilt and improved the fortification, though no obvious enemy threatened his capital.

«We helped break these works once,» Maniakes said to Ypsilantes, «but they look a good deal stronger than they did then.»

«Aye, that's so, your Majesty,» the chief engineer said, nodding. «Still, I expect we'll manage. Smerdis, now, he had horsemen who would fight for him, and that made life hard for us, if you'll recall. The walls and such are better now, I'll not deny, but so what? The troops in and around 'em count for more; men are more important than things.»

«Do you know,» Maniakes said, «I've had a bard tell me just that. He said that as long as the people in his songs were inter-esting the settings mattered little—and if the people were dull, the finest settings in the world wouldn't help.»

«That makes sense, your Majesty—more sense than I'd expect from a bard, I must say. When you get down to the bottom of anything you can think of, near enough, it's about people, isn't it?» Ypsilantes looked at the fortifications ahead. «People who huddle behind thick stone are more difficult, worse luck.»

«If they're trying to keep us from doing what we need to do, I should say so.»

«We'll manage, never fear,» Ypsilantes repeated. «With no cavalry, they'll have trouble sallying against us, too, the way Smerdis' men did.»

«That's so,» Maniakes said. «I'd forgotten that sally till you reminded me of it. Makuraners popping out everywhere—I won't be sorry not to see that, thank you very much.»

The Makuraners did not sally. They did fling large stones from catapults in their fortresses. One luckless Videssian scout drew too close to one of those forts at exactly the wrong moment; he and his mount were both smashed to bloody pulps. That made Maniakes thoughtful. Even with his own stone– and dart-throwers set up to shoot back at the ones the Makuraners had in place, his army would have to run the gauntlet before breaking into Mashiz. It would be expensive, and he did not have all that many men he could spare; that he had any army that could stand against the Makuraners he took as something close to direct intervention from Phos, considering how many years of defeat Videssos had suffered.

He cast about for ways other than the most direct one to break into Mashiz. The riders he sent forth to spy out those others ways returned to him unmashed but less than optimistic: Sharbaraz had made sure getting into his capital would not be an easy business. He lacked the Cattle Crossing to hold foes away, but had done all he could with what he had.

«Straight on, then,» Maniakes said reluctantly. Ypsilantes nodded, now less enthusiastic than he had been. Even Rhegorios looked worried about the likely size of the butcher's bill. Maniakes also kept worrying about what Bagdasares' magic had meant. Should he go ahead, knowing—or thinking he knew—he could not stay west of the Tib for long?

With his usual unassuming competence, Ypsilantes readied the Videssian catapults to oppose those of the Makuraners. Maniakes mustered the army for what he hoped would be a quick, fierce descent on Mashiz. He was about to give the order for the attack to begin when a courier galloped up from out of the northeast, holding up a message tube and shouting, «Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The Makuraners are in Across, the whole great army of them, and they and the cursed Kubratoi have made common cause against Videssos the city. The city might fall, your Majesty.»

For a long moment, Maniakes simply stared at the messenger as if he'd been spouting some incomprehensible gibberish. Then, all at once, the pieces seemed to make a new and altogether dreadful pattern. Keeping his voice under tight control, he asked, «When you say the Makuraners are back at Across, do you mean the main army under Abivard son of Godarz?»

«Aye, your Majesty, that's who I mean—who else?» the fellow answered. «Abivard and Romezan and stinking Tzikas the traitor, too. And all the boiler boys. And all the siege gear, too.» He pointed toward Ypsilantes' catapults to show what he meant.

Rhegorios said, «All right, the Makuraners are back at Across again. So what? They've been there before, for years at a stretch. They can't cross over to Videssos the city.»

But the messenger said, «This time, maybe they can, your highness, your Majesty. The Kubratoi have a whole great swarm of those one-trunk boats of theirs out on the water, and they've been going back and forth to the westlands. We can't stop all of that, as much as we wish we could.»

«By the good god,» Maniakes whispered in horror. «If they can get their stone-throwers and towers and such up against the walls of the city—»

«The walls are strong, your Majesty,» Rhegorios said, for once not bothering to ring playful changes on his cousin's title. «They've stood a long time, and nobody yet has found a way through them.»

«That's so,» Maniakes answered. «I can think of two drawbacks to it, though. For one, the Makuraners really know how to attack fortifications; they're at least as good at it as we are. We've seen that in the westlands, more times than I care to think about. And for the other, walls aren't what keep attackers out. Soldiers are. Where are the best soldiers in the Empire? No, to the ice with that. Where are the only soldiers in the Empire who've proved they can stand up to the Makuraners in battle?»

Rhegorios didn't say anything. Maniakes would have been astonished had his cousin said anything. The answer to the rhetorical question was only too obvious: he led the sole Videssian army that had proved itself against the foe. The rest of the Empire's forces, he feared, were still all too much like the armies that had lost to the boiler boys again and again and again. That would not be true in another two or three years—which, unfortunately, did him no good whatever now.