"Consolidating my position here comes first, though. After all, we don't want the Makuraners back, do we?"

"What we want and what we get aren't always the same thing," the merchant answered, his voice sour. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he seem to realize they might be taken as criticism of Maniakes. A moment after that, he had made himself scarce. Maniakes ruefully shook his head. It wasn't as if the same thought hadn't crossed his mind a time or twelve.

Engineers surveyed the ground west of Across, seeking the best line on which to establish field fortifications. The suburbs on the far side of the Cattle Crossing from Videssos the city had been unwalled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Who could have imagined an enemy dangerous enough to penetrate to the very heart of the Empire? Imagined or not, the Makuraners had been here; the evidence of that was only too obvious.

The chief engineer, a stocky, dour man named Stotzas, said, "I can lay you out the sites for some fine works, your Majesty. I see one trouble, though-no, two." He was the sort who saw more troubles the longer he looked at something.

Maniakes had no trouble seeing these for himself. He held up his thumb. "Where am I going to find the men to build the works you lay out?" He stuck up his index finger beside thumb. "Where am I going to find soldiers to put in the works even if you do manage to build them?"

"You've just rolled Phos' little suns," Stotzas said. His big, blunt-featured head bobbed up and down as he nodded. "Mind you, your Majesty, I'll do everything I can for you, but…" His voice trailed away. He didn't flee, as the merchant had, but he didn't look delighted about speaking the whole truth, either.

"But there's liable not to be much you can do, what with manpower being the way it is," Maniakes suggested.

Stotzas nodded, glad for the respite. He said, "At that, I've got it easy. Brick and stone don't argue back. The lord with the great and good mind may know what to do about the mess with the temples, but I'm bound for the ice if I do."

"Nor I," Maniakes answered, feeling a good deal less than impudent. "Whoever came up with the idea of forcing priests in places the Makuraners hold to adopt Vaspurakaner usages was a fiendishly clever man. Some of the priests will have done it sincerely, others to curry favor with the invaders, others just to survive. Sorting out who did what for which reasons is liable to take years, especially when everybody's busy calling everybody else a liar."

"Like I said, bricks and stone, they keep quiet," Stotzas replied. "Shave a man's head and put a blue robe on him and it doesn't seem like he'll ever shut up."

That wasn't altogether fair. A great deal of the monastic life, for instance, was passed in prayerful silence. But the chief engineer had a point. In defending themselves and accusing their neighbors, the clerics who jostled for audience with Maniakes did the reputation of the temples no good.

After listening to one set of denunciations and counter-denunciations, all of them backed with documents-each side insisting the documents of the other were forgeries-Maniakes burst out, "A pox take the lot of you, holy sirs!" That wasn't the way a good and pious ruler was supposed to address his clerics, but he was too fed up to care. "You may send this whole great mound of tripe to the most holy Agathios, to let him deal with it as he will. Until such times as he decides the case, I command you to live at peace with one another and to respect one another as orthodox, regardless of who may have done what to whom while the Makuraners were here."

"But, your Majesty," one blue-robe cried, "these wretches reveled in their lapse into heresy, glorying in the chance to bring the temples into disrepute."

A priest of the other faction shouted, "You're the ones who dragged the good name of the temples through the wineshops and bathhouses with your shameless pandering to the invaders."

The two sides started calling each other liars and apostates again, just as they had when they first came before Maniakes. He slammed his open palm down on the table in front of him. The small thunderclap of noise made clerics from both sides momentarily fall silent in surprise.

"Perhaps you misunderstood me, holy sirs," Maniakes said into that brief silence. "You may respect one another as orthodox until the ecumenical patriarch renders his decision on your cases, or you may call one another heretics to your hearts' content-in gaol. Which will it be?"

The clerics weren't screaming at one another when they left his presence, which represented progress of a sort. When they were gone, he slumped back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Rhegorios came over and thumped him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, my cousin your Majesty. You'll have cases like that in every town we reconquer from the Makuraners."

"No, I won't, by the good god," Maniakes burst out. "Agathios will, and we'll find out what-if anything-the most holy sir is made of and what he's good for." Given what he had seen of Agathios, that wasn't apt to be much. He screwed his face up, as if he had tasted wine gone into vinegar. "You've given me the first decent argument I've heard for letting the Makuraners keep the westlands."

Rhegorios laughed, as if he had made a joke.

From Across, Videssian forces cautiously pushed south and west. It was by no means a reconquest of the westlands but a slow, wary reoccupation of territory Abivard had, for the time being, abandoned. In somewhat bolder style, Maniakes ordered a few bands of horsemen deeper into the westlands to see if they could nip in behind big Makuraner forces and wreck the supply columns that kept them stocked with arrows and spear-points and iron splints for their cuirasses.

He ordered his men not to attack the Makuraner field armies. "Not this year," he said. "First we learn to hurt them in other ways. Once we know we can do that, we think about facing them in open battle again. Meanwhile, let's see how they like moving through a hostile countryside."

The short answer was, the Makuraners didn't like it. They started burning villages to show they didn't like it. Maniakes didn't know whether to mourn or cheer when he got that news. It would depend on whether the Makuraners cowed the westlands or infuriated them.

In response, he sent for more raiding parties, many of them aboard ship to go to the northern and southern coasts of the westlands and strike inland from there. "Maybe, just maybe," he told his father, "we'll be able to force the boiler boys off balance for a change. The one place where they can't match us is on the sea."

"That's so," the elder Maniakes agreed. He plucked a long white hair from his beard and held it out at arm's length so he could see it clearly. After he let it fall to the ground, he looked sidelong at his son and asked, "Have you got a naval captain whose head you wouldn't mind seeing up on the block?"

"I could probably come up with one," Maniakes allowed. "Why would I want to, though?"

His father's eyes twinkled. "The Kubratoi can't match us on the sea, either. Those monoxyla of theirs are all very well-until they run up against a dromon. After that, they're wreckage with butchered meat inside. I was just thinking you could send a captain up along the coast of Kubrat to raid and then, when Etzilios screamed blue murder, send him the fellow's head and say it was his idea all along."

Maniakes gaped, then laughed till the tears came. "By the good god, Father, now you've gone and tempted me. Every time I look north, I'm going to think of doing just what you said. It might not even make the khagan go back to war with us; he's clever enough, curse him, to see the joke."

"If you weren't at war with Makuran…" the elder Maniakes said.

"And if I had a ship's captain I really wanted to be rid of," the Avtokrator added. "It would hardly be fair to an up-and-coming officer."