Harry Turtledove - Hammer And Anvil

"Eminent Tzikas!" Maniakes shouted, loud as he could.

The gray-bearded man's head came up. Maniakes waved to him. He started to wave back, then seemed to recognize Maniakes and changed the gesture to a salute.

"Your Majesty!" he called, and rode toward the Avtokrator.

Maniakes waved at the chaos all around them. "What happened?" he asked. "After holding so long-"

Tzikas shrugged, as if to deny that any of the sorry spectacle was his fault.

"We lost, your Majesty," he answered. "That's what happens when every Makuraner in the world comes at you, when none of the other generals in the westlands will lend you a counterfeit copper's worth of aid, when all we hear from Videssos the city is that there's no help to be had there, either, or else that your head is forfeit if you ever take a pace away from the soldiers who protect you-" He made a disgusted gesture. "I could go on, but what's the use? To the ice with it. To the ice with everything."

"Amorion's gone to the ice, seems like," Maniakes said. He remembered that Tzikas had blamed the failings of one of his fellow generals for the defeat in which Tatoules disappeared, and wondered if the man knew how to take responsibility for his own actions.

"Do you think you'd have done better, your Majesty?" Tzikas growled-almost the same question Genesios had put to Maniakes when he was captured.

"Who can say?" Maniakes looked Tzikas up and down. "Splendid footgear you have there, eminent sir," he remarked. But for a couple of narrow black stripes, Tzikas' boots were of imperial crimson. At any distance, they would have looked like the red boots reserved for the Avtokrator alone.

The general shrugged again. "The way things have been, all the Videssian authority around these parts has been invested in me-nothing much coming from the capital but trouble, as I said. I thought I ought to look the part, or come as close to it as I could in law and custom."

He was on this side of both law and custom-barely on this side, but inarguably so. Maniakes wondered if, one fine day, he might have pulled on boots without any black stripes. The Avtokrator wouldn't have been a bit surprised. Taking Tzikas to task, though, would have to wait. "Are you pursued?" he asked the ever-so-punctilious general.

"We're not riding east to settle our supper, your Majesty," Tzikas answered.

"Aye, the boiler boys are on our trail, great droves of 'em." He peered north, then south, gauging the forces Maniakes had with him. "No point even standing in their way. They'll go through you like a knife through fat bacon."

"Mm, not necessarily," Maniakes answered after a moment's thought. "They're chasing what they think is a broken band of fugitives, after all. If we hit the ones out in front of the pursuit and hit them hard, we may be able to knock their whole army back on its heels. Phos willing, we'll save the Arandos valley for this year, or most of it, anyhow."

Tzikas' face was pinched and narrow, not one for showing joy under the best of circumstances. Now that circumstances were far from the best, he all but radiated gloom. "Your Majesty, if you press forward and see the numbers arrayed against us, you will know resistance is hopeless."

"Until I see them for myself, I don't know anything of the kind," Maniakes answered. "Eminent sir, if you and as many of your men as you can bring want to ride with us, you'll be welcome and you can give useful aid. If not, then kindly keep running east; don't stay around infecting us with the notion that everything is lost."

He waited to see how Tzikas would take that. The general scowled; he wasn't used to taking orders or to being dismissed so peremptorily. After a moment, he said, "You are the Avtokrator; it shall be as you command." His voice was flat, empty of any feeling whatsoever, for good or ill.

Maniakes could not fault him when he started shouting to his men to rally. He had a bigger voice than his slim frame suggested, and used it to good effect. Some of the horsemen fleeing the fall of Amorion kept right on fleeing, but others reined in and began adding themselves to Maniakes' regiments. Maniakes' troopers seemed to gain fresh heart, too, seeing that not everything was falling to pieces before their eyes.

"Forward!" Maniakes shouted. The trumpeters sent the command to the whole force, as if the men were ships spread across the sea. They advanced at a trot they could quickly kick up to a gallop at need.

Here and there, they passed Videssians leading lame horses and men on foot whose horses must have foundered altogether or been killed. Those soldiers stared in disbelief at the spectacle of a strong force from their own side heading toward the oncoming Makuraners rather than away from them.

They also passed dead horses and dead men-freshly dead, not yet bloated and stinking. Those would have been wounded when they fled Amorion and its environs, but they hadn't made it to safety. Maniakes' mouth was a thin, bitter line. So many men thrown away these past seven years. Genesios couldn't have done a better job of gutting the Empire if he had set out to accomplish exactly that.

Then Maniakes spied another body of soldiery riding east. At first, from a distance, he thought they were more imperials trying to break free from the Makuraners. After a moment, he realized they were the Makuraners from whom the garrison at Amorion had been trying to get free.

They rode big, strong horses. With their style of fighting, they needed such sturdy beasts, too. The riders wore full armor of chain and splints, with lamellae protecting their arms and legs. Chainmail veils of iron rings hung from their helmets to ward their faces. Only their eyes and hands showed, and iron half-gauntlets held weapons away from the backs of those hands.

Even their horses wore iron scales mounted on leather, an armor that reached back to the animals' flanks. The riders carried long, heavy spears, with swords slung in scabbards on their left sides so they could protect themselves if their spearshafts broke in battle.

"Ply them with arrows!" Maniakes shouted. "Stay at long range and scattered-don't come to close quarters with them." Those were standard tactics for Videssians fighting their western neighbors. Videssian cavalrymen wore mail shirt and helmet only, and never rode armored horses. The Makuraner horsemen and their mounts had to be sweltering in the heat, which was why the Videssians had given them the scornful "boiler boy" nickname.

The Makuraners' lances came down to point straight at their foes; the sun sparkled off sharp-edged iron. "Sharbaraz King of Kings!" the heavy-armored cavalrymen shouted in their own language. Maniakes spoke it, not with any great fluency but enough to make himself understood. The Makuraners had other cries, too: "Abivard!" and "Hosios Avtokrator!"

Maniakes looked around for Abivard but did not see him. The enemy who had been his friend must not have been with his foremost troops. His own men yelled "Videssos!" and "Maniakes Avtokrator!" back at the Makuraners. A few Videssians also yelled "Tzikas!" They all sounded fierce and spirited, which made Maniakes' heart leap. Videssians had lost so many fights lately that any show of courage had to come as a surprise to their foes.

His troopers reached back over their shoulders to pluck arrows from their quivers, then nocked them, drew bows back to their eyes, and let fly. A couple of hundred years before, such horse archery would have been much more difficult, but stirrups let a rider control his mount well enough that he could without hesitation use both hands to shoot. Stirrups also let the Makuraners charge with the lance without fear of being unseated: Videssos and Makuran had taken the same notion and gone in different directions with it Not all of Maniakes' troops were archers. For closer-in work, javelin men nipped toward the enemy, flung their darts, and then tried to make off before the Makuraners could draw near enough to spear them out of the saddle. Not all of them escaped as they would have hoped. At close quarters, an armored Makuraner boiler boy was more than a match for any one Videssian horseman.