Harry Turtledove - Hammer And Anvil

The melancholy horn calls rang out. Videssian military doctrine didn't represent retreat as anything to cause shame. Realistically, no army could expect to win every fight. If you didn't win, staying to be slaughtered was stupider than drawing back, because it lowered your chances of winning the next fight.

But regardless of whether retreat was shameful, it was fraught with danger. If soldiers gave way to panic, they were just a mob, and they would be massacred as surely as if they had let the enemy surround them. "Hold together!"

Maniakes shouted, over and over till his throat was raw. "If we hang together, they can't drive us like wolves after deer."

Sticking together as they drew back, as the Kubratoi poured arrows into them from both flanks and from ahead, took almost superhuman discipline. Maniakes looked around for Etzilios. If he could kill the khagan, the Kubratoi might collapse. He had had his chances earlier and passed them by. Now it was too late; Etzilios, like any sensible general, led his troops from behind. With a manifest victory developing before their eyes, they didn't need to see their ruler in action to be inspired.

More horns rang out, the braying horns of the barbarians. A quick charge at the right of Maniakes' crumbling line made him send men there to hold it. But the charge proved a feint. Screaming like fiends, the Kubratoi staged another charge into the Videssian center-and broke it.

The rout Maniakes had dreaded was on. With Kubratoi in among them as well as on their flanks, the imperials no longer even tried to hold firm. Giving up any thought of staying together, they fled southward singly and in small bands, no thought but escape in their minds. The Kubratoi pursued, baying on the chase.

Maniakes was swept along with the rest. A group of about fifty men clung together-too large for the Kubratoi to assail when so many smaller, easier targets were there for the taking. But then one of the nomads spotted the imperial raiment in among that band of Videssians, and after that they were never free of the foe again.

Had Etzilios been anywhere close by, he no doubt would have urged his men to go after the Avtokrator regardless of the casualties it cost them. But the khagan was elsewhere on the field, and none of the men dogging Maniakes thought to ride off again and ask what to do next: being barbarously self-sufficient, they believed themselves able to make their own choices.

Maniakes spied a stand of oaks ahead. "Let's ride in among them," he said.

"Aye, why not?" one of the soldiers said. "The trees will keep them from raining arrows on us the way they have been."

"We'd go faster through open country," another man said. "The closer we stick to the road, the better the time we'll make."

"How fast isn't everything," Maniakes answered. "How you go counts, too. Come on." He guided his horse toward the trees. Most of the men in the band went with him. Six or eight, though, struck off on their own in the hopes the road would give them a better chance to escape the nomads.

Once in among the trees, Maniakes brought his blowing horse to a halt and dismounted. "Here, your Majesty, you can piss later," a trooper said gruffly. Maniakes ignored him. He undid the golden belt that held his robe closed, and threw it on the ground. Then he pulled off the heavy robe with its precious metallic threads and draped it over a branch. Wearing only his thin linen undertunic and drawers, he climbed back onto the Kubrati pony. "Now they won't hound us so much," he said. "I don't look like the Avtokrator any more."

His troopers nodded approvingly. He himself felt low enough to walk under a mouse without ruffling its belly fur. What could be more dishonorable and disgraceful than abandoning the imperial raiment to escape with your hide unpunctured? Only one thing occurred to him: dying when you had a means of survival at hand. Even so, he knew he would replay this scene in his nightmares as long as he lived. Whether he would live long enough to have more nightmares remained an open question.

More than forty men emerged from the south side of the stand of oaks. Maniakes was suddenly much less conspicuous than he had been. Now the Kubratoi harassed his band no more than any other of like size. He wondered if he should also have thrown away the red boots. That would have made riding harder. Besides, keeping them on let him cling to the notion that he had salvaged something of the imperial regalia.

"Where now, your Majesty?" a trooper asked.

"Back to Videssos the city, as best we can," Maniakes answered. Bagdasares' magic-and how was Bagdasares now? and Kameas? and the servitors? and the mimes? and everyone else Maniakes had led on this disastrous jaunt?-had shown he would come back to the city. But it hadn't shown him safe inside the walls. Now more than ever, he wished he could have looked back over his shoulder and seen if anyone was gaining on him.

As the routed Videssians fled south, the pursuit grew more distant. Maniakes wanted to draw more consolation from that than he actually could. It wasn't so much that he and his comrades had outrun the nomads, though that was part of it. But more, Maniakes knew all too well, was that the Kubratoi were busy plundering not only his camp with all its riches but also the surrounding countryside. How many Videssian peasants would they round up and herd north to labor for them? Where would he find other peasants to replace the ones the barbarians were kidnapping? With the Kubratoi in the north and the Makuraners ranging as they pleased in the westlands, Videssos might have no people left in a few years' time.

"We have to be careful not to founder our horses," Maniakes warned his comrades in misfortune. "If they break down before we get home, I expect we're done for."

His own pony, the one he had taken from the dead Kubrati, was still working magnificently. It was an ugly little beast, short and rough-coated, but it could run. Every so often, he paused to let it rest and pull up some grass and weeds from the ground. It seemed happy enough with that.

After a while, his own stomach started growling. The eruption of the Kubratoi had come before he got a chance to eat much at the feast. He rummaged in the beast's saddlebags to see what its former owner had been carrying. The first thing he found was a skin that, when he untied it, gave off the odor of sour milk. He threw it away. The Kubratoi might live on such fare, but Videssians? A moment after he had rejected the stuff, he cursed himself for a fool. No matter how nasty it smelled, it was food of a sort, and he was liable to be hungry by the time he got to Videssos the city.

The nomad had also been carrying strips of sun-dried mutton and flat griddlecakes of barley. The mutton was so hard, he could hardly bite it. As for the griddlecakes, they came as close to having no flavor whatsoever as anything he had ever eaten. He wolfed them down regardless. They had kept the nomad going, and they would do the same for him.

Camp that night was a cold, miserable affair. No one dared light a fire, for fear it would draw the Kubratoi. A raw wind blew out of the northwest. It smelled of rain, though none fell that night. Maniakes and his companions counted themselves lucky there. They had only a few blankets among them, and huddled together for warmth like the luckless sheep Maniakes' cooks had butchered for what should have been a celebration of peace with the Kubratoi.

Trying to find someplace comfortable on the ground, trying to keep the rest of the Videssians from kicking or elbowing him, Maniakes dreamed up a whole flock of grandiose vengeances to visit upon Etzilios' head. The one he liked best involved loosing Genesios' wizard, the old man who had almost killed him, against the khagan. Setting that mage, whoever and wherever he was, on the foes of Videssos for a change struck him as only fitting and proper. He fell asleep still imagining revenge.