Fueled by desperation, fervor, and that coldly rational cry, the heretics surged against the right wing of the imperial line. As they had once before, they shot and hacked their way through the Halogai and Videssians protecting Krispos. All at once, being of high rank stopped mattering.
Off to one side of Phostis, Sarkis laid about him with a vigor that denied his bulk. To the other, Krispos and Katakolon were both engaged. Before Phostis could spur his horse to their aid, someone landed what felt like a hammer blow to his shield.
He twisted in the saddle. His foe was yelling at the top of his lungs; his was the voice that had urged the Thanasioi against Krispos. "Syagrios!" Phostis yelled.
The ruffian's face screwed into a gap-toothed grimace of hate. "You, eh?" he said. "I'd rather carve you than your old man—I owe you plenty, by the good god." He sent a vicious cut at Phostis' head.
Just staying alive through the next minute or so was as hard as anything Phostis had ever done. He didn't so much as think of attack; defense was enough and more. Intellectually, he knew that was a mistake—if all he did was try to block Syagrios' blows, sooner or later one would get through. But they came in such unrelenting torrents that he could do nothing else. Syagrios was twice his age and more, but fought with the vigor of a tireless youth.
As he slashed, he taunted Phostis: "After I'm done with you, I'll settle accounts with that little whore who crowned me. Pity you won't be around to watch, on account of it'd be worth seeing. First I'll cut her a few times, just so she hurts while I'm—" He went into deliberately obscene detail.
Fury all but blinded Phostis. The only thing that kept him from attacking wildly, foolishly, was the calculating look in Syagrios' eyes as he went through his speech. He was working to enrage, to provoke. Refusing to give him what he wanted was the best thing Phostis saw to do.
A Haloga came up on Syagrios' left side. The ruffian had no shield, but managed to turn aside the guardsman's axe with the flat of his blade. That wouldn't work every time, and he knew it. He spurred his horse away from the northerner—and from Phostis.
As he drew back, Phostis cut at him. The stroke missed. Phostis laughed. In the romances, the hero always slashed the villain into steaks. In real life, you were lucky if you didn't get hacked to bits yourself.
Since he was for the moment not beset, Phostis looked around to see how his comrades were faring. He found Krispos in the midst of a sea of shouting Thanasioi. The Avtokrator, badly beset, slashed frantically this way and that.
Phostis spurred toward him. To the Thanasioi, he was nothing—just another soldier, a nuisance, not a vital target like Krispos. He wounded three heretics from behind in quick succession. That sort of thing wasn't in the romances, either; they went on and on about glory and duels and fair fights. Real war, Phostis was discovering in a hurry, didn't concern itself with such niceties. If you stayed alive and the other fellow didn't, that was a triumph of strategy.
The Halogai also fought their way in Krispos' direction. So did all the reserves who saw he was in danger. Quite suddenly, no living Thanasioi were near the Avtokrator. Krispos' helmet had been battered so that it sat at a crazy angle on his head. He had a cut on his cheek—almost a match for Katakolon's— and another on his sword arm. His gilded mail shirt and shield were splashed with sticky red.
"Hello, everyone," he said. "Rather to my surprise, I find myself still in one piece."
Several variations of Glad you are rose into the air, Phostis' among them. He looked round for Syagrios, but did not see him. Real battle lacked the romances' neat resolutions, too.
Krispos went in the blink of an eye from a horseman fighting wildly for his life to the commander of a great host. "Drive them hard!" he shouted, pointing toward the center of the line. "See them waver? One good push and they'll break."
Had Zaidas not said Krispos lacked all talent for magic, Phostis might have believed him a wizard then. No sooner had he called attention to the sagging Thanasiot line than crimson banners began falling or being wrested from the hands of the heretics who bore them. The roar that went up from the imperials at that rang through the valley like a great horn call.
"How could you tell?" Phostis demanded.
"What? That?" Krispos thought for a moment, then looked sheepish. "Part of it comes from seeing a lot of fights. My eye knows the signs even if my mouth doesn't. And part of it— sometimes, don't ask me how, you can make your will reach over a whole battlefield."
"Maybe it is magic."
Phostis didn't realize he'd spoken out loud until Krispos nodded soberly. "Aye, it is, but not of the sort Zaidas practices. Evripos has a touch of it; I've seen that. You haven't yet had the chance to find out. You can rule without it, not doubt of that, but it makes life easier if it's there."
One more thing to worry about, Phostis thought. Then he shook his head. He needed to worry about two things, not one: whether he had the magic of leadership, and how vulnerable he would be if Evripos had it and he didn't.
At any other time, he might have occupied himself for hours, maybe days, with worries over those two. Now, with the battle swinging the imperials' way at last—could it be past noon already?—he had no leisure for fretting.
"Forward!" came the cry all along the line. Phostis was glad to press the fighting. It relieved him of having to think. As he'd found in Olyvria's arms, that could be a blessing of sorts. The only trouble was, worries didn't go away. When the fighting or the loving was done, they reared their heads again.
But not now. Shouting "Forward!" with the rest, he rode against the crumbling resistance of the Thanasioi.
Krispos looked out at victory and found it as appalling as it usually is. Pierced and mangled men and horses were the building blocks of what the chroniclers would one day call a splendid triumph of arms. At the moment, it reminded Krispos of nothing so much as an open-air slaughterhouse, down to the stink of entrails and the buzz of hungry flies.
Healer-priests wandered through the carnage, now and then stooping to aid some desperately wounded man. Their calling did not let them discriminate between Krispos' followers and the Thanasioi. Once, though, Krispos saw a blue-robe stand up and walk away from someone, shaking his shaven head in bewilderment. He wondered if a dying Thanasiot had possessed the courage to tell the healer he would sooner walk the gleaming path.
Most of the heretics, though, were glad enough to get any help the imperials gave them. They held out gashed arms and legs for bandages and obeyed their captors' commands with the alacrity of men who knew they might suffer for any transgression. In short, they behaved like other prisoners of war Krispos had seen over the years.
Katakolon rode up to the Avtokrator. "Father, they've run down the heretics' baggage train. In it they found some of the gold, ah, abstracted from the mint at Kyzikos."
"Did they? That's good news," Krispos said. "How much of the gold gold was recovered?"
"Something less than half the amount reported taken," Katakolon answered.
"More than I expected," Krispos said. Nevertheless, he suspected the troopers who'd captured the baggage train were richer now than when they'd started their pursuit. That was part of the price the Empire paid for civil war. If he tried to squeeze the gold out of them, he'd get a name for niggardliness that might lead to another revolt a year or three down the line.
"Your Majesty!" Another messenger waved frantically. "Your Majesty, we think we have Livanios!"
The gilded mail shirt that weighed on Krispos' shoulders all at once seemed lighter. "Fetch him here," the Avtokrator ordered. Then he raised his voice. "Phostis!"