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had the foe tried trapping him on the west bank of the Tib? It wasn't a
question with a precise answer, but too much tolled through his head like a
bell with two mournful notes. Once the army had passed over the bridge,
Ypsilantes pointed back to the structure his engineers had bled to build.
"What do we do with it now?"
"Collect whatever timbers you need and burn the rest," Maniakes snapped. "That
won't matter much the Makuraners have their own bridges of boats but it may
slow them some. And why should we make life easy for them?"
Flames crackled. Smoke rose into the sky, thick and black. When the Makuraners
had gone over the Degird under Peroz King of Kings to attack the Khamorth
nomads, they'd thrown a bridge across that river: Maniakes remembered Abivard
speaking of it. And once their survivors, the handful of them, had returned to
Makuran, they'd burned that bridge. Now he understood how their engineers must
have felt then.
Back on the west bank of the Tib, a few Makuraner soldiers stood watching the
Videssians wreck the bridge. He wondered what they thought of his retreat.
They hadn't beaten him. They hadn't come close to beating him. In the end,
though, what did that matter? Regardless of the reason, he was quitting their
land. If that didn't mean they had won and he had lost, he had no idea what it
did mean.
"We want to move fast," he told his warriors. "We don't want to give the
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Makuraners the chance to delay us with skirmishes or anything of the sort.
We're faster than they are; that means we mostly get to choose when to engage
and whether to engage and the answer is going to be no unless we can't
possibly help it. If they offer battle, we'll go around them if we find any
way to do it. If we don't " He shrugged. " we go through 'em." For the first
couple of days on the move through the Land of the Thousand Cities, they saw
only scouts and the peasants who worked the land. One of those looked up from
the garden plot he was weeding and shouted, "Thought you thieves had gone on
to afflict somebody else!"
After riding past the irate farmer, Rhegorios snapped his fingers in
annoyance.
"Oh, a pestilence!" he burst out. "I should have told him it was his turn
again. It would have been worth it, just to see the look on his face."
"Nice to know you don't always think of the right thing to say when you need
to say it," Maniakes told him. "But I tell you this you re not going to turn
around and go back for the sake of watching his jaw drop. Nobody goes back for
anything, not now."
Sooner than Maniakes had hoped, the Makuraner forces in the Land of the
Thousand Cities realized the Videssian army was withdrawing. The enemy began
trying to obstruct the withdrawal, too. That irked him; he had hoped they
would be content to see him go and not seek to delay him and let him do more
damage to the floodpiain.
His captains took renewed skirmishing and floods ahead of them almost as a
personal affront. "If they so badly want us to stay, we ought to go back to
thrashing them, the way we have the past couple of years," Immodios said
angrily.
"I don't think anyone in the Land of the Thousand Cities wants us to stay,"
Maniakes answered. "I think the King of Kings is the one who wants us stuck
here. If we're fighting here between the Tutub and the Tib, even if we're
beating everything they throw at us, we aren't heading back to Videssos the
city and defending it against
Abivard. Delaying us here helps the enemy there."
Immodios considered that, then nodded. "Sharbaraz has a long reach and a sure
one, if he can keep his mind on what he does here and far away at the Cattle
Crossing, both at the same time."
"This year, Sharbaraz has shown me more than in all the time before this I've
had on the throne," Maniakes replied, genuine regret in his voice. "Making an
alliance with Kubrat against us no King of Kings ever thought of anything like
that before.
He's a good deal more clever than I dreamed he could be. But he's not so
clever as he thinks he is, not if you think back to that shrine we found, the
one where he was made out to be the Makuraner God. He doesn't live at the very
center of the world and have it all spin round him, no matter what he thinks."
"Ah, that shrine. I'd forgotten that." Immodios sketched Phos' sun-circle
above his heart. "You're right, your Majesty. Anyone who's foolish enough to
think of himself as a god, well, it doesn't matter how smart he is other ways.
Sooner or later, he's going to make a bad mistake. Another bad mistake, I
should say."
"Sooner or later," Maniakes echoed. "I think you're right. No, I know you're
right.
It would be nice, though, with things as they are, to have the mistake come
sooner.
We could use it."
His army crossed the major north-south canal between the Tutub and the Tib.
Getting over it made him smile; Bagdasares' magic had done a good job of
delaying the Makuraners there the year before. Then Maniakes' smile congealed
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