Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

down the center. Gorgidas saw a nomad undo his trousers and urinate in the channel; no one paid him any mind.
    The Greek shook his head. In Elis, where he had grown up, such things were commonplace. The cry of “
Exito!
Here it comes!” warned pedestrians that a fresh load of slops was about to be thrown out. But the Romans had better notions of sanitation, and in their greater cities the Videssians did, too. Here on the frontier they did not bother—and surely paid the price in disease.
    Well, what of it? Gorgidas thought; they have healer-priests to set things right. Then he wondered even about that. By the look of things, many of the Pristans kept their plains customs and probably did not follow Phos. He glanced toward the Videssian god’s temple. Its discolored stones and weather-softened lines proclaimed it one of the oldest buildings in the town, but streaks of tarnish ran down the gilded dome atop it. Skylitzes saw that, too, and frowned.
    If Pikridios Goudeles felt any dismay at the temple’s shabby condition, he hid it well. But he grew voluble when he saw the inside of the inn the natives, through Skylitzes, had assured him was the best Prista offered. “What a bloody hole! I’ve seen stockyards with better-run pens.”
    Two of the Pristans scowled; Gorgidas had thought they understood Videssian. In truth, the Greek was with Goudeles. The taproom was small, poorly furnished, and decades overdue for cleaning. Caked-on soot blackened the wall above each torch bracket. The place smelled of smoke, stale liquor, and staler sweat.
    Nor was the clientele more prepossessing. Two or three tables were filled by loafers who might have been blood-brothers to the idlers on the docks. Half a dozen Videssians drank at another. Though most of them were in their middle years, they wore gaudy, baggy-sleeved tunics like so many young street ruffians; each looked to have a fortune in gold on his fingers and round his neck. Their voices were loud and sharp, their speech filled with the capital’s slang.
    In Latin, Viridovix murmured, “Dinna be gambling with these outen your own dice.”
    “I know thieves when I see them,” Gorgidas answered in the same language, “even rich thieves.”
    If the taverner was one such, he spent his money elsewhere. A short, fat man, his sullen mouth and suspicious eyes belied all the old saws about jolly plump folk. The upstairs room he grudgingly yielded to the embassy was hardly big enough to hold the five straw-stuffed mattresses a servant fetched in.
    Goudeles tipped the men with the party’s equipment. Once they had gone, he fell down onto a mattress—the thickest one, Gorgidas noted—and burst out laughing. At his companions’ curious stares, he said, “I was just thinking: if this is the best Prista has to offer, Phos preserve me from the worst.”
    “Enjoy it while you may,” Skylitzes advised.
    “No, the pudgy one is right,” Arigh said. Goudeles, unpacking a fresh robe, did not seem overjoyed at his support, if that was what it was. The Arshaum went on, “Even the finest of towns is a prison; only on the plains can a man breathe free.”
    Someone rapped politely on the door—a soldier. He had the half-Khamorth look of most folk here, being wide-shouldered, dark, and bushy-bearded. But he wore chain mail, instead of the boiled leather of the plains, and spoke good Videssian. “You are the gentlemen from the
Conqueror
, the envoys to the Arshaum?”
    He bowed when they admitted it. “His excellency the
hypepoptes
Methodios Sivas greets you, then, and bids you join him at sunset tonight. I will come back then to guide you to his residence.” He dipped his head again, sketched a salute, and left as abruptly as he had come. His boots thumped on the narrow stone stairway.
    “Is the
hyp
—whatever—a wizard, to be after knowing we’re here almost before we are?” Viridovix exclaimed. He had seen enough sorcery in the Empire to mean the question seriously.
    “Not a bit of