Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 by Harry Turtledove Page A

a young legionary; on Viridovix, who stood out because of his inches and his Celtic panoply.
    At last he turned to the waiting Sevastos and Sevastokrator, saying quietly, “These are soldiers.” To Thorisin Gavras that seemed to explain everything. He relaxed at once, as did the Haloga guardsmen. If their overlord was willing to let these outlanders keep their rude habits, that was enough for them.
    Sphrantzes, on the other hand, opened his mouth for further protest before he realized it would do no good. His eyes locked resentfully with the tribune’s, and Marcus knew he had made an enemy. Sphrantzes was a man who could not stand to be wrong or, more to the point, to be seen to be wrong. If he made a mistake, he would bury it … and maybe its witnesses, too.
    He covered his slip adroitly, though, nodding to Marcus in a friendly way and saying, “At sunset tomorrow evening we have tentatively scheduled a banquet in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, in honor of yourarrival. Would it be convenient for you and a small party of your officers to join us then?”
    “Certainly,” Marcus nodded back. The Sevastos’ smile made him wish he could bring, not his officers, but a food-taster instead.
    The Hall of the Nineteen Couches was a square building of green-veined marble not far from the actual living quarters of the imperial family. There had been no couches in it for generations, Marcus learned, but it kept its name regardless. It was the largest and most often used of the palace compound’s several reception halls.
    When Scaurus and his companions—Gaius Philippus, Quintus Glabrio, Gorgidas, Viridovix, and Adiatun, the captain of slingers, along with Tzimiskes—came to the Hall’s double doors of polished bronze and announced themselves, a servitor bowed and flung the doors wide, crying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Ronams!”
    There was a polite spatter of applause from the guests already present. Scaurus suppressed an urge to kick the bungling fool and resigned himself to being called a Ronam for the next year.
    The Videssian custom was to talk, nibble, and drink for a time before settling down to serious eating. Marcus took a chilled cup of wine from the bed of snow on which it rested, accepted a small salted fish from a silver tray proffered by the most bored-looking servant he had ever seen, and began to circulate through the crowd.
    He soon became aware that four distinct groups were present, each largely—and sometimes pointedly—ignoring the other three.
    In the corner by the kitchens, civil servants, gorgeous in their bright robes and colorful tunics, munched hors d’oeuvres as they discussed the fine art of government by guile.
    They sent supercilious glances toward the crowd of army officers who held the center of the hall like a city they had stormed. Though these sprang from several nations, they, too, had a common craft. Their shoptalk was louder and more pungent than that of the bureaucrats, whose sneers they returned. “Plague-taken pen-pushers,” Marcus heard a young Videssian mutter to a Haloga clutching a mug of mead almost as big as his head. Already half-drunk, the northerner nodded solemnly.
    Over half the Roman party vanished into this group. Gaius Philippus and Nephon Khoumnos were talking about drill fields and training techniques. Glabrio, gesturing as he spoke, explained Roman infantry tactics to a mixed audience of Videssians, Namdaleni, and Halogai. And Adiatun was trying to persuade a buckskin-clad Khamorth that the sling was a better weapon than the bow. The nomad, a better archer than any Adiatun had imagined, was obviously convinced he’d lost his mind.
    If the councilors were peacocks and the soldiers hawks, then the ambassadors and envoys of foreign lands who made up the third contingent were birds of various feathers. Squat, bushy-bearded Khamorth wore the wolfskin jackets and leather trousers of the plains and mingled with a couple of other, more distant, plainsmen whose