Bridge of the Separator

Budin licked his lips. "I think we will not stay behind. I think Takshaki also thinks this. But he wants grazing space and wine and riches and plunder. You want endless war against Videssos. These are not the same thing."

What would you have been if you'd grown up in Videssos and truly been trained in how to think? Rhavas wondered. With your native shrewdness, you would have been formidable. You are wasted as a nomad shaman. Budin was bound to be right again. Rhavas thought it better not to come out and admit as much. "If you want to take what should be yours, you will need to fight to seize and to hold it," he said. "That suits me, and should suit you as well."

"Time will tell if it does," Budin said—yes, he was shrewd.

Here, though, he was not shrewd enough. When he thought of time, he thought of one year, or five years, or ten. No man was likely to think in terms longer than those. Rhavas did. He was starting to think in terms of generations, of lifetimes. Had he not been promised years, many years, to bring his hopes and those of his new master to fruition? He had, or he was convinced he had, and he intended to take advantage of it.

A broad ditch with fortresses spaced every couple of miles along the eastern edge of it had protected the Empire of Videssos from incursions off the steppe. It had. It did not anymore. The fortresses stood empty. The edges of the ditch had begun to fall in on themselves. Takshaki's tribe had no trouble getting its flocks and herds across to the other side. No one challenged them. No Videssians were in any position to challenge them, nor had they been since the fortresses emptied so their soldiers could go fight in the civil war.

As for the Khamorth—well, the new land was wide. There was plenty of room for them to spread across it as they pleased. So none of them challenged Takshaki's entrance into what had been Videssos, either.

Sometimes the nomads guided their animals. Sometimes they simply let them wander where the grazing was good. Takshaki preferred the latter way. His cattle and sheep ambled north and east. That disappointed Rhavas; the plainsmen headed into an area far from any place where the writ of Stylianos and Sozomenos ran these days. He thought about leaving them and attaching himself to another tribe more actively engaged against Videssos. It would be easier now that he'd picked up some of the barbarians' language.

Rhavas thought about it, but then abandoned the idea, at least for a while. Takshaki's herds and flocks moved east along a river valley—snowy now, as it had been the last time Rhavas traveled along it—that grew more familiar the farther he went. It was the valley of the Anazarbos, and the livestock and the tribe were on their way to Skopentzana.