Kameas said, "May it please your Majesty, a messenger has just come bearing word from Abivard the Makuraner general."
"What can he want of us now?" Maniakes wondered. He had trouble concentrating on the affairs of Videssos; he had laid Niphone to rest only a few days before. Gamely he tried to bring his mind to the business at hand. "Have him enter, esteemed sir."
The messenger prostrated himself, then handed Maniakes a rolled parchment sealed with ribbon and wax. As he broke the seal, he wondered if he would be able to make sense of the letter inside. He spoke Makuraner fairly well but didn't read it Abivard, though, must have had a local translate his thoughts for him, for the missive was written in Videssian: "Abivard the general serving the mighty Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, to Maniakes styling himself Avtokrator: Greetings. I learn with sadness of the death of your wife. Accept, please, my condolences on this, your personal loss; may the Prophets Four guide her to union with the God."
Maniakes turned to Kameas. "Bring me sealing wax, please, esteemed sir." As the vestiarios hurried off to get it, Maniakes inked a reed pen and wrote rapidly on a sheet of parchment: "Maniakes Avtokrator to the Makuraner general Abivard: Greetings. My thanks for your kind personal wishes. My own wish is that you and your army would withdraw from lands to which you have no right. I speak there both as Avtokrator of the Videssians and in my own person. It was for that purpose that I sent the eminent Triphylles as ambassador to Sharbaraz King of Kings. Have you yet any word of the progress of his embassy?"
He rolled up the parchment and tied it with one of the ribbons he normally used for decrees. Kameas returned with a stick of the crimson sealing wax reserved for the Avtokrator alone. The eunuch handed the wax to him, then picked up a lamp. Maniakes held the lamp to the flame. Several drops fell onto the ribbon and parchment. While they were still soft, Maniakes pressed his sunburst signet into them. He withdrew the ring, waved the sealed letter in the air to make sure it hardened properly, and gave it to the messenger. "Be sure this reaches Abivard, by whatever means you have of arranging such things." He didn't need to know the details, and so did not inquire after them.
The messenger took the parchment, stuffed it into a waterproof tube of boiled, waxed leather, and, after prostrating himself to Maniakes once more, hurried out of the imperial residence. "May I see what the Makuraner general wrote, your Majesty?" Kameas asked.
"Yes, go ahead," Maniakes answered. Maybe Stavrakios had been bold enough to keep his vestiarios from knowing everything that happened to him. Few Avtokrators since had been. Maniakes certainly was not.
Kameas said, "He speaks you fair, no doubt of that. One thing the Makuraners have shown, though, is that their deeds don't commonly live up to the words they use to cloak them."
"Too true," Maniakes said. "The same holds true for the Kubratoi. The same held true for Videssos, too, during the reign of my late and unlamented predecessor. I, of course, am the very Milestone of truthfulness."
"Of course, your Majesty," Kameas said, so seriously that Maniakes doubted whether he had caught the intended irony. Then the vestiarios let out the smallest, most discreet snort imaginable.
"Go on, esteemed sir," Maniakes told him, starting to laugh. "Take yourself elsewhere."
"Yes, your Majesty," the vestiarios replied. "The good god grant that Abivard give you good news concerning the eminent Triphylles."
He turned and swept away, leaving Maniakes staring after him in astonishment. He hadn't seen what the Avtokrator had written; he hadn't been in the chamber then. "How did you know?" Maniakes asked. But by then Kameas was a long way down the hall. If he heard, he gave no sign.
Great pillars of smoke rose from Across, as they had when Abivard's forces entered the suburb the autumn before. Now they were leaving, giving Maniakes easy access to the westlands if he wanted to try conclusions with the Makuraners again this summer.
Wondering whether he did was only part of what worried him. He turned and put the other part to Rhegorios: "If he's leaving there, where in Phos' holy name is he going?"
"My cousin your Majesty, damn me to the ice if I know." Rhegorios spat on the ground in rejection of Skotos. "All I can say is, he's likely headed where he thinks he can do us the most harm."
"He could have done worse staying right where he was," Maniakes said, discontent in his voice. "Across was like the stopper in the jar; his holding it kept us out of the westlands. Now we can go back, if we dare. But what will happen to us if we do?"
"Can't tell that till we try it-if we try it," Rhegorios answered. "But I can tell you what happens if we don't: the Makuraners get to keep the countryside for another year and make it even harder for us to get it back when we do finally work up the nerve to try."
Maniakes grimaced. That his cousin was blunt did not mean he was wrong. Maniakes said, "I wish I thought our army was in better shape. We've worked hard this winter, but…" He let that hang.
"You could take Tzikas' advice," Rhegorios said with a curl of his lip. "If you stay right here in Videssos the city, you know, and only wait long enough, why, eventually every single fellow who opposes you now will die of old age, and then Videssos will be free to take back its own."
"Ha-ha," Maniakes said in a hollow voice. His cousin exaggerated Tzikas' cautious approach to war, but only slightly. "We have to fight the Makuraners, we have to do it in the westlands, and we have to do it on our own terms. We can't afford any more fiascoes like the one last summer. If we aren't in a position to go out there and win, we shouldn't fight."
"How do you propose to guarantee that?" Rhegorios asked. "Just about every time there's a battle, the bastards on the other side have a nasty habit of fighting back. You can't simply count on them to lie down and die, no matter how much you wish they would."
"To the ice with you," Maniakes said, laughing in spite of himself. "You know what I mean, no matter how clumsily I say it. I can't let myself get lured into situations where I don't have the advantage. The more of what's ours we take, the more men and resources we gather for the next step."
"If we can start by taking back Across, that will be something," Rhegorios said.
Take it back they did, after the dromons on endless patrol in the Cattle Crossing reported that Abivard and his horsemen had indeed abandoned the suburb. Soon after imperial soldiers reentered Across, Maniakes sailed over the strait to the westlands to see what the Makuraners had done to it.
His first impression was that what his men had taken was not worth having and that the Makuraners had abandoned it only because nothing was left to wreck. Most of what could burn had been burned; what hadn't been burned had been torn apart to get fuel for the fires made of the rest.
In ever-growing streams, people emerged from the ruins to spin him tales of woe and horror. He listened to them sympathetically but without much surprise; he knew how armies treated a countryside populated by enemies. The Makuraners had done nothing out of the ordinary. Robberies and rapes were part of the long, sad litany of man's inhumanity to man-and to woman.
"But, your Majesty," said an aggrieved merchant whose stock of fine boots now adorned Makuraner feet, "aren't you going to chase after those thieving heathens and make 'em pay for what they done?" By his tone, he expected Maniakes to set a properly itemized bill before Abivard the next time he saw him.
"I'll do everything I can," Maniakes said evasively; he didn't care to answer that just being in the westlands this year was as much as he had hoped for.