«My compliments, Excellency,» Abivard said. «Compared to what I've seen elsewhere, your warriors deserve to be recruited into the personal guard of the King of Kings.»

«You are generous beyond my deserts, lord,» Tovorg answered, cutting roast mutton with the dagger he wore on his belt. «I try only to do my duty to the realm.»

«Too many people are thinking of themselves first and only then of the realm,» Abivard said. «To them—note that I name no names—whatever is easiest is best.»

«You need name no names,» the city governor of Harpar said, a fierce gleam kindling in his eyes. «You come from Mashiz, and I know by which route. Other towns between the rivers are worse than those you have seen.»

«You do so ease my mind,» Abivard said, to which Tovorg responded with a grin that showed his long white teeth.

He said, «This was of course my first concern, lord.» Then he grew more serious. «How many peasants shall I rout out once you have moved on, and how much of the canal system do you think we'll have to destroy?»

«I hope it doesn't come to that, but get ready to rout out as many as you can. Destroying canals will hurt the cropland but not your ability to move grain to the storehouses—is that right?»

«There it might even help,» Tovorg said. «We mostly ship by water in these parts, so spreading water over the land won't hurt us much. What we eat next year is another question, though.»

«Next year may have to look out for itself,» Abivard answered.

«If Maniakes gets here, he'll wreck the canals as best he can instead of just opening them here and there to flood the land on either side of the banks. He'll burn the crops he doesn't flood, and he'll burn Harpar, too, if he can get over the walls or through them.»

«As we did in the Videssian westlands?» Tovorg shrugged. «The idea, then, is to make sure he doesn't come so far, eh?»

«Yes,» Abivard said, wondering as he spoke where he would find the wherewithal to stop Maniakes. Harpar's garrison was a start but no more. And they were infantry. Positioning them so they could block Maniakes' progress would be as hard as he'd warned Sharbaraz.

«I will do everything I can to work with you,» Tovorg said. «If the peasants grumble—if they try to do anything more than grumble—I will suppress them. The realm as a whole comes first»

«The realm comes first,» Abivard repeated. «You are a man of whom Makuran can be proud.» Tovorg hadn't asked about rewards. He hadn't made excuses. He'd just found out what needed doing and promised to do it. If things turned out well afterward, he undoubtedly hoped he would be remembered. And why not? A man was always entitled to hope.

Abivard hoped he would find more city governors like Tovorg.

«There!» A mounted scout pointed to a smoke cloud. «D'you see, lord?»

«Yes, I see it,» Abivard answered. «But so what? There are always clouds of smoke on the horizon in the Thousand Cities. More smoke here than I ever remember seeing before.»

That wasn't strictly true. He'd seen thicker, blacker smoke rising from Videssian cities when his troops had captured and torched them. But that smoke had lasted only until whatever was burnable inside those cities had burned itself out. Between the Tutub and the Tib smoke was a feet of life, rising from all the Thousand Cities as their inhabitants baked bread, cooked food, fired pots, smelted iron, and did all the countless other things requiring flame and fuel. One more patch of it struck Abivard as nothing out of the ordinary.

But the scout spoke with assurance: «There lies the camp of the Videssians, lord. No more than four or five farsangs from us.»

«I've heard prospects that delighted me more,» Abivard said. The scout showed white teeth in a grin of sympathetic understanding.

Abivard had known for some time the direction from which Maniakes was coming. Had the refugees fleeing before the Videssian Avtokrator been mute, their presence alone would have warned him of Maniakes' impending arrival, as a shift in the wind foretells a storm. But the refugees were anything but mute. They were in fact voluble and volubly insistent that Abivard throw back the invader.

«Easy to insist,» Abivard muttered. «Telling me how to do it is harder.»

The refugees had tried that, too. They'd bombarded him with plans and suggestions till he had tired of talking with them. They were convinced that they had the answers. If he'd had as many horsemen as there were people in all the Thousand Cities put together, the suggestions—or some of them—might have been good ones. Had he even had the mobile force he'd left behind in Vaspurakan, he might have been able to do something with a few of the half-bright schemes. As things were—

«As things are,» he said to no one in particular, «I'll be lucky if I don't get overrun and wiped out.» Then he called to Turan. The officer who had commanded his escort on the road from Vaspurakan down to Mashiz was now his lieutenant general, for he'd found no man from the garrison forces of the Thousand Cities whom he liked better for the role. He pointed to the smoke from Maniakes' camp, then asked, «What do you make of our chances against the Videssians?»

«With what we've got here?» Turan shook his head. «Not good. I hear the Videssians are better than they used to be, and even if they weren't, it wouldn't much matter. If they hit us a solid blow, we'll shatter. By any reasonable way of looking at things, we don't stand a chance.»

«Exactly what I was thinking,» Abivard said, «almost word for word. If we can't do anything reasonable to keep Maniakes from rolling over us, we'll just have to try something unreasonable.»

«Lord?» Turan stared in blank incomprehension. Abivard took that as a good sign. If his own lieutenant couldn't figure out what he had in mind, maybe Maniakes wouldn't be able to, either.

The night was cool only by comparison to the day that had just ended. Crickets chirped, sawing away like viol players who knew no tunes and had only one string. Somewhere off in the distance a fox yipped. Rather closer, the horses from Maniakes' army snorted and occasionally whickered on the picket lines where they were tied.

Stars blazed down from the velvety black dome of the sky. Abivard wished the moon were riding with them. Had he been able to see his way here, he wouldn't have fallen down nearly so often. But had the moon been in the sky, Videssian sentries might well have seen him and his comrades, and that would have been disastrous.

He tapped Turan—he hoped it was Turan—on the shoulder. «Get going. You know what to do.»

«Aye, lord.» The whisper came back in the voice of his lieutenant. That took one weight off his mind, leaving no more than ninety or a hundred.

Turan and the band he led slipped away. To Abivard they seemed to be making an appalling amount of noise. The Videssians not far away—not far away at all—appeared to notice nothing, though. Maybe the crickets were drowning out Turan's racket. Or maybe, Abivard thought, you're wound as tight as a youth going into his first battle, and every little noise is loud in your ears.

Had he had better officers, he wouldn't have been out here himself, nor would Turan. But if you couldn't trust someone else to do the job properly, you had to take care of it for yourself. Had Abivard been younger and less experienced, he would have found crouching there in the bushes exciting. How often did a commanding general get to lead his own raiding party? How many times does a commanding general want to lead his own raiding party? he wondered, and came up with no good answer.

He hunkered down, listening to the crickets, smelling the manure—much of it from the farmers themselves—in the fields.

Waiting came hard, as it always did. He was beginning to think Turan had somehow gone astray when a great commotion broke out among the Videssians' tethered horses. Some of the animals whinnied in excitement as the lines holding them were cut; others screamed in pain and panic when swords slashed their sides. Turan and his men ran up and down the line, doing as much harm in as short a time as they could.