"Let it be as you require, your Majesty," he said now, bowing his head. "I shall send the sakellarios of the High Temple to confer with the logothete of the treasury on the best way to make sure we have an exact record of how much gold and silver is borrowed from each shrine we control."
"I'm sure your treasurer and mine will quickly agree on those procedures," Maniakes said. "By giving up some of your wealth for a little while, you help preserve Phos' faith on earth."
"I hope what you say is true," Agathios answered heavily. "Should it prove otherwise, you will have a great deal for which to answer, not merely to me-I am, after all, but a man-but to the lord with the great and good mind. By your leave-" Robes swirling about him, he swept out of the imperial residence.
A couple of days later, a messenger brought Maniakes a note sealed with the treasury's signet. "Kourikos to Maniakes Avtokrator: Greetings. May your boldness against foreign foes be rewarded with victories no less splendid-and no less startling."
Maniakes read the note twice, then folded the scrap of parchment on which it was written. "If Phos grants me that," he said, "I'll take it."
"Not long after Midwinter's Day, you say?" Maniakes stared at Niphone and shook his head. "I thought you'd have more time to recover from your last birth before you had to start thinking about"-a euphemism for worrying about-"another one."
"It is as the good god wills." Niphone sketched the sun-circle over her heart.
"I am in Phos' hands now, as I have been all my life. He will do with me as he thinks best. I cannot believe he would deny you the heir Videssos needs."
"An heir is all very well," Maniakes said, "but-" He didn't go on. How were you supposed to tell your wife, But I'm afraid this birth will be the death of you? You couldn't. Besides, she knew the risks as well as he did. She had been the one who wanted to press ahead, where he would have protected her if she had let him.
Evtropia was almost two months old, but Niphone still looked worn from the struggle she had had bringing her daughter into the world. Could she gather enough strength to go through labor again so soon?
"We'll have a healer-priest standing by outside the Red Room," Maniakes declared. Niphone nodded obediently. We'll have a surgeon there, too, in case we have to take the babe, Maniakes thought. That he kept to himself.
"Everything will be all right," Niphone said, but then, as if she wasn't quite convinced of that herself, she added, "and if not, I'll dwell in Phos' eternal light forevermore."
"We'll have no more talk of that sort," Maniakes said firmly; he might have been dressing down a young soldier who wasn't shaping quite as well as he had hoped. Niphone nodded, accepting the rebuke. Maniakes hugged her to show he wasn't really angry, then walked into the hall.
He almost bumped into Rhegorios. "Have a care there, my cousin your Majesty," the Sevastos said with a grin. Then he got a look at Maniakes' face. "Oh, by the good god, what's gone wrong now?"
"Eh? Nothing. Very much the opposite, as a matter of fact." Maniakes steered Rhegorios down the hall so he could talk without his wife's overhearing.
"Niphone's going to have another baby."
"That's good news, for a change," Rhegorios agreed. "Why do you look as if the Makuraners just showed up at the Cattle Crossing?" Then his eyes widened.
"You're that worried about her?"
"I am," Maniakes answered. "The midwife as much as told me that if she got pregnant again-" He stopped, not wanting to speak words of evil omen, and went on at a tangent, "But Niphone was the one who wanted to try again as soon as might be, and so-" He stopped again.
Rhegorios sketched the sun-circle over his heart. "May the lord with the great and good mind look after her and the babe both. Now I understand why your face was so long."
"We'll have to see how things go, that's all." Maniakes scowled. "I wish that, somewhere in the Empire, I could make things happen, not wait for what happens and have to react to it."
"Well, if the Kubratoi stay quiet, you'll be able to take the field against the Makuraners this summer," Rhegorios said. "That looks to be fifteen thousand goldpieces well spent."
"If the Kubratoi stay quiet," Maniakes said. "And if I can find any soldiers with whom to fight Abivard and the rest of Sharbaraz's generals. And if I can find officers who won't run away. And if I can find the money to pay them-no, robbing the temples will take care of that, I admit, but it gives me more troubles further down the line."
"Parsmanios won't run away from the Makuraners," Rhegorios said, "and he won't be sorry to get out of the city and take a command, either."
Maniakes started to answer, then paused: it was his turn to study Rhegorios' face. "You won't be sorry to see him go, will you?"
"Well, no," his cousin answered. "He's been-testy-because you didn't make him Sevastos in my place."
"I know," Maniakes said, "but I couldn't see the justice in taking you out of the post when you've done well in it. Maybe Father can make him see the sense of that. I own I haven't had much luck. But then, I haven't had much luck in anything since the crown landed on my head."
Rhegorios opened his mouth, probably to deny that, then stopped and thought about everything that had happened since Maniakes took the throne. What went through his mind was easy to read on his face; he hadn't fully learned the courtier's art of dissimulation. After a pause just short of awkward, he said, "The good god grant things get better."
"May it be so," Maniakes agreed. "When I meet Abivard again, I want to face him on something like even terms." He sighed. "We might be friends, he and I, did we not spring from different lands. We got on well when we worked together to put Sharbaraz back on his throne."
"Yes, and look at the gratitude he's shown since," Rhegorios said bitterly.
"He did claim to be avenging Likinios when he invaded us," Maniakes answered.
"Maybe he even partway believed it at the time. Of course, he still makes the same claim now, but I don't know of anyone on either side of the border who takes it seriously these days."
"On the other hand, the border's not where it was when he started the invasions, either," Rhegorios said. "It's moved a lot farther east."
"That's one of the things I shall have to attend to-if I can." Maniakes sighed again. "The way things have gone wrong here at the Empire's heart, I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't be better off sailing away to Kastavala and carrying on the fight from a land I could really control."
Rhegorios looked alarmed. "If you're wise, my cousin your Majesty, you'll never say that where anyone but I can hear it. I can't think of a better way to start panic here, and if you don't keep a tight grip on Videssos the city, you won't hold your grip on Videssos the Empire, either."
Maniakes weighed that. "Mm, you're probably right. But I miss being able to operate from a place where I needn't fear treachery if I stir out of the imperial residence and defeat if I go beyond the city walls."
"It will get better, your Majesty," Rhegorios said loyally.
"I hope you're right," Maniakes said, "but damn me to the ice if I see how."
"Maniakes, how could you?" Lysia demanded. He could have been angry at her for forgetting protocol, but, when even his wife called him "your Majesty," he rather relished being treated like a mere human being.
"I don't know. How could I?" he asked, and then, "How could I what?"
Now his cousin hesitated: not out of deference to him, he judged, but from reluctance to mention matters out of the usual ken of unmarried Videssian women. At last, visibly gathering her nerve, she went on, "How could you get your wife with child, knowing what might happen at the end of the confinement?"