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flooding.
Too late, it occurred to him that too much silence might well have made the
chief engineer draw his own conclusions, and that the conclusions were liable
to be right.
Whether Ypsilantes had his own conclusions or not, he carried out the orders
Maniakes gave him.
Foot soldiers were drawn up on the west bank of the Tib to harass the
engineers and, Maniakes supposed, to resist the Videssians if that harassment
failed. Thanks to magic, Maniakes knew it would. The Makuraners, being more
ignorant, kept trying to make nuisances of themselves.
They did a fair job of it, too, wounding several Videssian engineers once the
end of the bridge moved into archery range. Not too troubled, Ypsilantes sent
forward men with big, heavy shields: the same shields, in fact, that had
protected the barricade-clearing engineers in the sheds in the recent battle
with the Makuraners.
Behind those shields, the bridge builders kept working. Surgeons tended the
injured men, none of whom was hurt badly enough to need a healer-priest.
Maniakes remembered Abivard's story about the Makuraners' building a bridge
across the Degird River so they could cross it and attack the Khamorth out on
the
Pardrayan steppe. The Makuraner expedition had come to grief: indeed, to
disaster, with Peroz King of Kings dying there on the plains. The Avtokrator
hoped his own luck would be better than that. He had no way of knowing whether
he would become one of the little points of light Bagdasares' magic had shown
recrossing the Tib.
After a while, Ypsilantes also sent archers out to the end of the bridge to
shoot back at the Makuraners. The enemy, though, had more men on the bank than
the chief engineer could place at the end of the bridge. Seeing that, he sent
out boatloads of archers, too, and a couple of rafts with dart-throwers
mounted on them. They pumped enough missiles into the unarmored Makuraner
infantry, those from the dart-throwers beyond the range at which it could
respond, to sow a good deal of confusion in the foot soldiers' ranks.
"Here, let's do this," Maniakes said, calling Ypsilantes over to him. The
chief engineer grinned a nasty grin after they were done speaking together.
Those boats with archers in them began going rather farther up and down the
Tib, and making as if to land. That got the Makuraners running this way and
that. A couple of boats did land Videssian bowmen, who stayed on the west bank
of the Tib long enough to shoot a volley or two at the Makuraners, then
reembarked and rowed back out onto the river.
Meanwhile, the engineers kept extending the bridge of boats till it got quite
close to the western bank of the Tib. Watching their Progress, Maniakes said
to Rhegorios, "This is when I wouldn't mind having some Makuraner-style heavy
cavalry of my own. I could send them charging over the bridge and scatter that
infantry like this."
He snapped his fingers.
Rhegorios said, "I think the horsemen we have will be plenty to do the job."
"I think you're right," Maniakes said. Bagdasares' magic went a long way
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toward persuading him his cousin was right. How much good his being right
would do in the end was a different question, one Maniakes didn't want to
think about. Sometimes acting was easier than thinking. He assembled a force
of horsemen with javelins near the eastern edge of the bridge, ready to move
when the time came.
It came that afternoon: one of the engineers repotted, "Your Majesty, the
water under the bridge is only three or four feet deep now."
"Then we're going to go." Maniakes shouted orders to the trumpeters. Their
horn calls sent the horsemen thundering down the bridge toward the Makuraner
foot soldiers. It also sent the Videssian engineers and shieldmen leaping off
the bridge into the warm, muddy waters of the Tib.
He'd succeeded in surprising the Makuraners and their commander. The horses
splashed down into the water, then, urged on by their riders, hurried toward
the foe.
Some of the cavalrymen flung their javelins at the infantry awaiting them,
while others imitated the Makuraner boiler boys and used the light spears as
if they were lances.
The Videssians gained the riverbank and began to push the foremost Makuraners
back. That threw the ranks of the Makuraner infantry into worse disorder than
they had already known, and let the Videssians gain more ground still. At
Maniakes'
orders, more imperials rode over the almost-completed bridge to aid their
comrades.
"You're a sneaky one," Rhegorios shouted. "They figured the bridge would have
to be finished for us to use it."
"You don't want to do the thing they expect," Maniakes answered. "If they know
what's coming, they're most of the way to knowing how to stop it. If they
haven't seen it before, though " He watched avidly as his men carved out a
bridgehead on the western bank of the Tib. The riders who had used up their
javelins slashed at the
Makuraners with swords. Whoever was commanding this enemy army lacked the
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