Harry Turtledove: The Thousand Cities

There was another shift of scene. He saw more fighting, this time between Makuraners and Videssians. In the middle distance a town with a mud-brick wall stood on a hill that rose abruptly from flat farmland. That's somewhere in the land of the Thousand Cities, Abivard thought. The settlements there were so ancient that these days they sat atop mounts built up of centuries' worth of accumulated rubble. Again, he might have been seeing the future or the past. Videssians under Maniakes had fought Smerdis' Makuraners between the Tutub and the Tib to help return Sharbaraz to the throne.

The scene shifted once more. Now he had come full circle, for he found his point of vision back at Across, staring over the Cattle Crossing toward Videssos the city. He could see none of the dromons that had held his army away from the imperial capital.

Suddenly, something flashed silver across the water. He knew that signal: the signal to attack. He would-

The wine in the bowl bubbled and roiled as if coming to a boil. Whatever it had been about to show Abivard vanished then; it was once more merely wine. Bozorg smacked his right fist into his left palm in frustration. «My scrying was detected,» he said, angry at himself or at the Videssian mage who had thwarted him or maybe both at once. «The God grant you saw enough to suit you, lord.»

«Almost,» Abivard said. «Aye, almost. You confirmed for me that the 'narrow sea' of a prophecy I had years ago is indeed the Cattle Crossing, but whether the prophecy proves to be for good or ill I still do not know.»

«I would hesitate before I sought to learn that, lord,» Bozorg said. «The Videssian mages will now be alerted to my presence and watchful lest I try to sneak another scrying spell past them. For now, letting them ease back into sloth is the wiser course.»

«Let it be as you say,» Abivard answered. «I've gone without knowing the answer to that riddle for a long time now. A little longer won't matter-if in fact I can learn it before the event itself. Sometimes foreseeing is best viewed from behind, if you take my meaning.»

Before, Bozorg had shown him flattery. Now the wizard bowed with what seemed genuine respect. «Lord, if you know so much, the God has granted you wisdom beyond that of most men. Knowing the future is different from being able to change it or even to recognize it until it is upon you.»

Abivard laughed at himself. «If I were as wise as all that, I wouldn't have asked for the glimpses you just showed me. And if you were as wise as all that, you wouldn't have spent time and effort learning how to show me those glimpses.» He laughed again. «And if the Videssians were as wise as all that, they wouldn't have tried to keep me from seeing those glimpses, either. After all, what can I do about them if the future is already set?»

«Only what you have seen-whatever that may be-is certain, lord,» Bozorg warned. «What happened before, what may come after-those are hidden and so remain mutable.»

«Ah. I understand,» Abivard replied. «So if I saw, say, a huge Videssian army marching on me, I would still have the choice of either setting an ambush against it or fleeing to save my skin.»

«Exactly so.» Bozorg's head bobbed up and down in approval. «Neither of those is preordained from what you saw by the scrying: they depend on the strength of your own spirit.»

«Even if I do set the ambush, though, I also have no guarantee ahead of time that it will succeed,» Abivard said.

Bozorg nodded again. «Not unless you saw yourself succeeding.»

Abivard plucked at his beard. «Could a man who was, say, both rich and fearful have a scryer show him great chunks of his life to come so he would know what dangers to avoid?»

«Rich, fearful, foolish men have indeed tried this many times over the years,» Bozorg said with a scornful curl of his lip worthy of Tzikas. «What good does it do them? Any danger they do so see is one they cannot avoid, by the very nature of things.»

«If I saw myself making what had to be a dreadful error,» Abivard said after more thought, «when the time came, I would struggle against that course with all my might.»

«No doubt you would struggle,» Bozorg agreed, «and no doubt you would also fail. Your later self, having knowledge that the you who watched the scryer lacked, would assuredly find some reason for doing that which was earlier reckoned a disaster in the making-or might simply forget the scrying till, too late, he realized that the foretold event had come to pass.»

Abivard chewed on that for a while, then gave it up with a shake of his head. «Too complex for my poor, dull wits. We might as well be a couple of Videssian priests arguing about which of the countless ways to worship their Phos is the single right and proper one. By the God, good Bozorg, I swear that one flyspeck on a theological manuscript of theirs can spawn three new heresies.»

«They know not the truth and so are doomed to quarrel endlessly over how the false is false,» Bozorg said with a distinct sniff, «and to drop into the Void once their foolish lives have passed.»

Abivard was tempted to lock Bozorg and Artanas the hierarch in a room together to see which-if either-came out sane. Sometimes, though, one had to sacrifice personal pleasure for the good of the cause.

Bozorg bowed. «Will there be anything more, lord?»

«No, you may go,» Abivard answered. «Thank you for your service to me.»

«It is my pleasure, my privilege, my honor to serve a commander of such great accomplishment, one who excites the admiration of all who know of him,» Bozorg said. «Truly you are the great wild boar of Makuran, trampling down and tearing all her foes.» With a final bow the wizard reassembled his sorcerous paraphernalia, loaded it back into the saddlebags in which it had traveled from Mashiz, and took his leave.

As soon as his footsteps faded down the hall, Abivard let out a long sigh. This sorcerer wasn't a Tanshar in the making, either, being both oily as what the Videssians squeezed from olives and argumentative to boot. Abivard shrugged. If Bozorg proved competent, he'd overlook a great deal.

Abivard's marshals sprang to their feet to greet him. He went down their ranks accepting kisses on the cheek. A couple of his subordinates were men of the Seven Clans; under most circumstances he would have kissed them on the cheek, not the other way around. They might even have given him trouble about that had he been placed in command of them-were his sister not Sharbaraz' principal wife. As brother-in-law to the King of Kings, he unquestionably outranked them. They might resent that, but they could not deny it.

Romezan was a scion of the Seven Clans, but he had never given Abivard an instant's trouble over rank. Thick-shouldered rather than lean like most Makuraners, he was a bull of a man, the tips of whose waxed mustaches swept out like a bull's horns. All he wanted was more of Videssos than Makuran had yet taken. As he did at every officers' gathering, he said, «How can we get across that miserable little stretch of water, lord?»

«I could piss across it, I think, if I stood on the seashore there,» another general said. Kardarigan was no high noble; like Abivard, he was a dihqan from the Northwest, one of so many young men forced into positions of importance when their fathers and brothers had died on the Pardrayan steppe.

Romezan leered at him. «You're not hung so well as that.» Laughter rose from the Makuraner commanders.

«How do you know?» Kardarigan retorted, and the laughter got louder. The generals had reason to make free with their merriment. Up to the Cattle Crossing they'd swept all before them. Sharbaraz might be unhappy because they'd not done more, but they knew how much they had done.

«We must have marble in our heads instead of brains,» Abivard said, «not being able to figure out how to beat the Videssians, even if only for a little while, and get our men and engines across to the eastern shore. Can we but set our engines against the walls of Videssos the city, we will take it.» How many times had he said that?