As the sun set, the Videssians, instead of forcing another attack, made camp. Abivard thought about trying to disrupt them again but decided against it. For one thing, he suspected that Maniakes would have done a better job of posting sentries than he had before. And for another, he did not want to make the Videssians move. He wanted them to stay where they were so he could pin them between the force he had with him and the rest of his army which was still slowly slogging up from the south.

He looked east and west along the canal. As far as his eye could see, the campfires of his own host blazed. That encouraged him; the numbers that had seemed to be useless when he had begun assembling the garrison troops into an army proved valuable after all, in defense if not in attack.

«Will we fight tomorrow?» Roshnani and Varaz asked together. His wife sounded concerned, his elder son excited.

«It's up to Maniakes now,» Abivard answered. «If he wants to stay where he is, I'll let him—till the other half of my men come up. If he tries to force a crossing before then, we'll have a battle on our hands.»

«We'll beat him,» Varaz declared.

«Will we beat him?» Roshnani asked quietly.

«Mother!» Now Varaz sounded indignant. «Of course we'll beat him! The men of Makuran have been beating Videssians for as long as I've been alive, and they've never beaten us, not once, in all that time.»

Above his head Abivard and Roshnani exchanged amused looks. Every word he'd said was true, but that truth was worth less than he thought. His life did not reach over a great stretch of time, and Maniakes' army was better and Abivard's worse than had been true in any recent encounters.

«If Maniakes attacks us, we'll give him everything he wants,» Abivard promised. «And if he doesn't attack us, we'll give him everything he wants then, too. The only thing is, that will take longer.»

When it grew light enough to see across the canal, sentries came shouting to wake Abivard, who'd let exhaustion overwhelm him at a time he gauged by the moon to be well after midnight. Yawning and rubbing sand from his eyes with his knuckles, he stumbled out of his tent—the wagon hadn't gone aboard the raft– and walked down to the edge of the water to see why the guards had summoned him.

Already drawn up in battle array, the Videssian army stood, impressively silent, impressively dangerous-looking, in the brightening morning light. As he stood watching them, they sat on their horses and stared over the irrigation channel toward him.

Yes, that was Maniakes at their head. He recognized not only the imperial armor but also the man who wore it. To Maniakes he was just another Makuraner in a caftan. He turned away from the canal and called orders. Horns blared. Drums thumped. Men began tumbling out of tents and bedrolls, looking to their weapons.

Abivard ordered archers right up to the bank of the canal to shoot at the Videssians. Here and there an imperial trooper in the front ranks slid off his horse or a horse bounded out of its place in line, squealing as an arrow pierced it

A return barrage would have hurt Abivard's unarmored infantry worse than their shooting had harmed the Videssians. Instead of staying where he was and getting into a duel of arrows with the Makuraners, though, Maniakes, with much loud signaling from trumpets and pipes, ordered his little army into motion, trotting east along the southern bank of the canal. Abivard's troops cheered to see the Videssians ride off, perhaps thinking they'd driven them away. Abivard knew better.

«Form line of battle facing east!» he called, and the musicians with the army blew great discordant blasts on their horns and thumped the drums with a will. The soldiers responded as best they could: not nearly so fast as Abivard would have expected from trained professionals, not nearly so raggedly as they would have a few weeks before.

Once they had formed up, he marched all of them after Maniakes except for a guard he left behind at the ford. He knew he could not match the speed of cavalry with men afoot but hoped that, if the Videssians forced a crossing, he could meet them at a place of his choosing, not theirs.

He found such a place about half a farsang east of the encampment: rising ground behind a north-south canal flowing into—or perhaps out of—the larger one that ran east-west. There he established himself with the bulk of his force, sending a few men ahead to get word of what was happening farther east. If one of his detachments was battling to keep Maniakes from fording the bigger canal, Abivard would order more troops forward to help. If it was already too late for that…

The canal behind which he'd positioned his men was perhaps ten feet wide and hardly more than knee-deep. It would not have stopped advancing infantry; it wouldn't do anything but slow oncoming horses a little. Abivard's foot soldiers stood in line at the crest of their little rise. Some grumbled about having missed breakfast, and others boasted of what they would do when they finally came face to face with Maniakes' men.

That was harmless and, since it helped them build courage, might even have helped. What be feared they would do, on facing soldiers trained in a school harder than garrison duty, was run as if demons like those the Prophets Four had vanquished were after them.

«These are the tools Sharbaraz gave me,» Abivard muttered, «and I'm the one he'll blame if they break in my hand.» Already, though, he'd drawn Maniakes away from the straight road to Mashiz, and so Sharbaraz, with luck, was breathing easier on his throne.

He shaded his eyes against the sun and peered eastward. Dust didn't rise up from under horses' hooves in this well-irrigated country as it did most places, but the glitter of sun off chain mail was unmistakable. So was the group of men fleeing his way. Maniakes' troopers had found and forced a ford.

Abivard yelled like a man possessed, readying his army against the imminent Videssian attack as best he could. Maniakes' horsemen grew with alarming speed from glints of sun off metal to toy soldiers that somehow moved of their own accord to real warriors. Abivard watched his own men for signs of panic as the Videssians, horns blaring, came up to the canal behind which his force waited.

Water splashed and sprayed upward when the imperials rode into the canal. Just for an instant the Videssians seemed to be wreathed in rainbows. Then, as if tearing a veil, they galloped through them, up onto the rising ground that led to Abivard's position.

«Shoot!» Abivard shouted. His own trumpeters echoed and amplified the command. The archers in his army snatched arrows from their quivers, drew their bows to the ear, and let fly at the oncoming Videssians. The thrum of bowstrings and the hissing drone of arrows through the air put Abivard in mind of horseflies.

Like horseflies, the arrows bit hard. Videssians tumbled from the saddle. Horses crashed to the ground. Other horses behind them could not swerve in time and fell over them, throwing more riders.

But the Videssians did not press their charge with the thundering drumroll of lances Abivard's field force would have used. Instead, their archers returned arrows at long range. Some of their javelin men did ride closer so they could hurl the light spears at the Makuraners. That done, the riders would gallop back out of range. Except for helmets and wicker shields, Abivard's men had no armor to speak of. When an arrow struck, it wounded. Near Abivard a man moaned and clutched at a shaft protruding from his belly. Blood ran between his fingers. His feet kicked at the ground in agony. The soldiers on either side of him gaped in honor and dismay. No, garrison duty had not prepared them for anything like this.

But they did not run. They dragged their stricken comrade out of the line and then returned to their own places. One of them stuffed the wounded man's arrows into his own bow case and went back to shooting at the Videssians with no more fuss than if he'd just straightened his caftan after making water.