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entertainment. Farmers and tradesmen, monks and students, whores and thieves,
fat merchants and sore-covered beggars, all came rushing out to see what the
new spectacle might be. Some cheered, some called down curses on the
Sphrantzai, but most just stood and stared, delighted the morning had brought
them this diversion.
Marcus saw an elderly woman point at the legionaries, heard her screech, "It's
the Gamblers, come to sack Videssos!" She used city slang for the Namdaleni;
even in the language of insult, theology came into play.
Curse the ignorant harridan, thought Scaurus. The crowds had just left off
being a mob; they could become one again in an instant. But the leader of the
street toughs, a thick-shouldered bear of a man named Arsaber, was still
jogging along beside the legionaries and came to their rescue now. "Shut it,
you scrawny old bitch!" he bellowed. "These here ain't Gamblers, they're our
friends the Ronams, so don't you give 'em any trouble, hear?"
He turned back to the tribune, grinning a rotten-toothed grin. "You Ronams,
you're all right. I remember during the riots last summer, you put things down
without enjoying it too much." He spoke of riots and the quelling thereof with
the expert knowledge someone else might show on wine.
Thanks to a bungling herald's slip at the imperial reception just after the
Romans came to Videssos, much of the city still mispronounced their name.
Marcus did not think the moment ripe for correcting Arsaber, though. "Well,
thanks," he said.
The plaza of Stavrakios, the coppersmiths' district already full of the sound
of hammering the plaza of the Ox, the red-granite imperial office building
that doubled as archives and jail, and a double handful of Phos' temples,
large and small, all flashed quickly by as the legionaries stormed toward the
palaces.
Then Middle Street opened out into the plaza of Palamas, the greatest forum in
the city. Scaurus nicked a glance at the Milestone, a column of the same red
granite as the imperial offices. There must have been a score of heads mounted
on pikes at its base, like so many gruesome fruit. Nearly all were fresh, but
terror had not been enough to keep the Sphrantzai on the throne.
The plaza market stalls were open, but Thorisin Gavras' blockade had cut
deeply into their trade. Bakers, oil sellers, butchers, and wine merchants had
little to sell, and that rationed and supervised by government inspectors.
Ironically, it was commerce in luxuries that flourished under the siege.
Jewels and precious metals, rare drugs, amulets, silks and brocades found
customers galore. These were the things that could always be exchanged for
food, so long as there was food.
The eruption of more than a thousand armed men into the plaza of Palamas sent
the rich merchants flying for their lives, stuffing their goods into pockets
or pouches and kicking over their stalls in their panic to be gone. "Will you
look at the loot getting away," Viridovix said wistfully.
"Shut up," Gaius Philippus growled. "Don't give the lads more ideas than they
have already." His vine-stave staff of office thwacked down on the corseleted
shoulder of a legionary who had started to stray. "Come on, Paterculus the
fight's this way! Besides, you bonehead, the pickings'll be better yet in the
palaces." That prediction was plenty to keep the men in line the troopers who
heard him fairly purred in anticipation.
They thundered past the great oval of the Amphitheater, the southern flank of
Palamas' plaza. Then they were into the quarter of the palaces, its elegant
buildings set off from one another by artfully placed gardens and groves and
wide stretches of close-trimmed emerald lawn.
A Roman swore and dropped his scutum to clutch at his right shoulder with his
left hand. High overhead, an archer in a cypress tree whooped and nocked
another shaft. His triumph was short-lived. Zeprin the Red's great two-handed
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axe was made for hewing heads, not timber, but the muscular Haloga proved no
mean woodsman. The axe bit, jerked free, bit again. Chips flew at every
stroke. The cypress swayed, tottered, fell; the sniper's scream of terror cut
off abruptly as he was crushed beneath the trunk.
"The gardeners will be angry at me," Zeprin said. A longtime veteran of the
Imperial Guard, he thought of the palace complex as his home and mourned the
damage he had done it. For the dead enemy he showed no remorse.
"Dinna fash yoursel', Haloga dear," Viridovix told him dryly. "They'll be
after having other things on their minds."
He waved ahead a barricade of logs, broken benches, and levered-up paving
flags scarred the smooth expanse of lawn. There were helmeted soldiers behind
it and bodies in front the high-water mark, it seemed, of the mob's attack on
the palaces.
The makeshift works might have been strong enough to hold off rioters, but
Scaurus' troops were another matter and a second look told him the defenders
were not many. "Battle line!"he ordered. His men shook themselves out into
place, their hobnailed caligae ripping the smooth turf. His eyes caught Gaius
Philippus'; they nodded together. "Charge!" the tribune shouted, and the
Romans rolled down on the barricade.
A few arrows snapped toward them, but only a few. With cries of "Gavras!" and
"Thorisin!" they hit the waist-high rampart and started scrambling over. Some
of the warriors on the other side stayed to fight with saber and spear, but
most, seeing themselves hopelessly outnumbered, turned to flee.
"Don't follow too close! Let 'em run!" Gaius Philippus roared out in Latin, so
the enemy could not understand. "They'll show us where their mates are
lurking!"
The command tested Roman obedience to the utmost, for their foes used not only
"The Sphrantzai!" and "Ortaias!" as war cries, but also "Rhavas!" It was all
the senior centurion could do to hold his men in check. The battle-heat was on
them, fanned hotter by lust for vengeance.
But Gaius Philippus' levelheaded order proved its worth. The enemy fell back,
not on the barracks where Scaurus had expected them to make their stand, but
through the ceremonial buildings of the palace complex and past the Hall of
the Nineteen Couches to the Grand Courtroom itself, after Phos' High Temple
the most splendid edifice in all Videssos.
The Hall of the Nineteen Couches had walls of green-shot marble and gilded
bronze double doors that would have done credit to a keep. It was useless as a
strongpoint, though, for a dozen low, wide windows made it impossible to hold
against assault.
Marcus wished the same was true of the Grand Courtroom. It was a small
compound in its own right, with outsweeping wings of offices making three
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