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Leo had reported. They were wrapped in black goatskins, were heavily armed,
and looked formidable.
Doubtless, if he and Leo expended their horses' strength to ride toward them,
they would attack.
Bryennius reached into his pack and pulled out a sling and one of the vials
holding the Greek fire.
Before Leo could stop him, he whirled the sling over his head. The vial
smashed against rock and scrub, creating a most satisfactory explosion that
would burn fiercely until the last scrap of wood or plant life was consumed.
"That ought to give us time to reach them," he said with satisfaction. "And
give them something to think about.
Down!"
They scrambled down the rocks and back to their horses.
"Prince," Leo said formally, "do you want me to go first?"
"Remind me," Bryennius said, "when we get to Kash-gar that I'm going to knock
you down for saying that. We ride together!" Leo's question hurt. He had lost
Alexandra, closer than a sister. Leo was his closest friend, his only
companioHave now. He didn't need a courtier; he needed the brother and friend
his rank had always denied him.
Leo laid a hand on his shoulder. "Remind me,"
he told Bryennius apologetically, "to let you try."
By the time they reached the fire, the barbarians had made a half-circle about
it, standing between it and the
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bundled-up figures who huddled by the few straggly packhorses and an amazing
number of goats, tended by the women and children. Though they seemed to move
about freely, Bryennius reminded himself not to stare at them. A man older and
taller than the rest and wearing, if possible, more noisome goatskins, came
forward bearing what looked like a blackened piece of wood, hacked roughly
into the form of a man, a flat plate of silver gleaming where the face ought
to be.
Two younger men carried a more elaborate statue of two men, hands on one
another's shoulders, legs overlapping. Some attempt had been made, though
probably with the blade of a spear or blunt knife, to carve features on the
two faces, which looked like younger men. The three men's progress with
their-icons? idols?-looked too ceremonial to be anything but a religious rite.
And when they started to chant, both Byzantines tensed. They had known chants
kill before. But it might be equally deadly to interrupt this one. Bryennius
strained to listen to the chief, priest, or whatever he was.
"Can you make sense of anything of that?" he hissed at Leo.
"The only thing I can make out is "Imra."
Their chief devil, I imagine," Leo said. Then he too stiffened. "Wait! That's
Greek!"
Bryennius nodded. "You're close," he said.
"I think some of those words are Macedonian." He had gained something from all
those years of listening while
Alexandra talked. When Alexander's armies had traveled through Persia and into
Hind, some men had deserted, while others, who married local women, decided to
remain behind. Legend had it that their descendants still lived in hidden
valleys, waiting for Iskandar, as they called him, to return. In an undertone,
he passed the story on to Leo. "They're far out of their range," he added.
"Maybe they're going to Kashgar to trade." It was better to hope for that than
to assume automatically that they were brigands.
"We're Greek," Leo said. "But Alexander's been dead over a thousand years.
That's a long time to wait."
"It's a long time, too, to preserve the language," Bryennius told him.
"Besides, what other chance have we got?"
Susan Shwartz
"What chance, indeed?" Leo said, and kneed his horse forward. "They've sighted
us," he muttered.
"Try to look royal"
"For that, I'll knock you down twice when we get to Kashgar!" Bryennius
hissed, then let his eyes go remote, his face become still and severe.
Six of the men mounted and rode toward them.
Bryennius heard a snick and shook his head at
Leo. "We ride in unarmed," he said in an undertone. "We are not afraid of
them."
"Like I said, you gamble for high stakes," his friend muttered. "Here they
come, and they've got their priest
with them."
The barbarians rode straight up to Bryennius and
Leo, and then dismounted. If they were going to attack, Bryennius thought,
they wouldn't have given up the advantage of their horses. After an eternity,
the priest walked up to them, stared, and finally prostrated himself,
muttering incantations and greetings in everything from
Persian to a hideously corrupt Greek.
Leo tugged at Bryennius' shoulder. "What are they saying? And why are they
bowing to us?"
Bryennius nodded almost ceremonially to the priest and the men who ringed
about them, awe on grimy faces that resembled the northern Greeks he had seen.
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"It's not Alexander. At least, they haven't made that connection yet. As you
heard, they have a god named
"Imra." Apparently, he has twin sons, or associates, called Ka caret sir and
Bekassir. Think of them as resembling Castor and
Pollux. Now they think . . ."
"They think we're these twins?" Leo cut in.
"Precisely," Bryennius said. "And that means we are in desperate trouble."
"Why?" Leo asked. If they were gods to these people, then they would be
delighted to feed them and protect them all the way to Kashgar. Blasphemous as
the idea was, it had a lot to recommend it.
"Why? Just look at us. Bryennius and Leo
Epiphanes. Don't you think we're feeble substitutes for gods-made-
manifest, trailing in hungry, bruised, and bleeding? Let's say they swallow
that. What happens the first time they want their resident gods to perform a
miracle or two? God, I wish
Alexandra were here to talk us out of this situation."
"Iskandar?" The priest raised his head, daring to interrupt the two.
Alexandra's name had won their attention. They knew that name. Bryennius began
to stitch together some sort of explanation, then shut his mouth on it as the
tribesmen bowed to the earth, as if to a Great King. Then two men took their
bridles to escort them ceremoniously back to camp. Now he and Leo couldn't
escape even if they wished to. Surreptitiously, Bryennius crossed himself.
Bryennius and Leo huddled shoulder to shoulder, wedged in between a number of
the tribesmen. As
Bryennius suspected, these people were far out of their own lands, which lay
far to the south, separated from Kashgar by the Pamirs. Restlessness, akin to
the fabled "longing"
of Alexander, had driven them north, Gumara the chief told Bryennius; after
hours of debate, the chief had accepted Byrennius as a member of
Alexander's royal house. Equally important had been the words of the priest
who spoke for Imra.
as portrayed by the crudely carved black figure
Bryennius had seen worshiping: Imra had commanded them to seek the Twins, his
sons, with whom these people's fortunes lay.
At least, Bryennius thought with some satisfaction, still made them realize
that Leo and I are not their gods.
But the instant they had shucked the cloak of divinity, they had been forced
to assume a sort of overchieftainship, the governance of a people whose laws,
as far as Bryennius could see, resembled complete anarchy. He had said as much
and been told that when he returned home with them, he could teach them the
Greek laws they had forgotten during the long centuries that they " been
deprived of their rightful king.
Susan
Shwanz
Since they obviously knew little better, Bryennius couldn't quite call them
savages. They had courage, honor, even art of a kind.
Certainly, their silver, though harshly wrought, had a massive, sculptural
beauty, and their weapons, crafted of the Indian steel they called wootz, were
so sharp that he and Leo had accepted new blades with genuine gratitude.
But the rest of it ...
barbarians, Bryennius thought for the thousandth time. Their relationship with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]