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Truth was, he missed Rotrude, missed her openness, her easygoing acceptance,
and the mind of her own that she most definitely had. The next opinion Niphone
expressed about anything more profound than the state of the weather would be
her first.
Very softly, Maniakes sighed to himself. He missed Rotrude for other reasons,
too. Niphone's approach to the marriage bed was dutiful, little more; he had
grown used to a partner who enjoyed what she was doing. He didn't think that
was just because Niphone was only now passing from maidenhood, either. It
sprang from a basic bit of who she was. He sighed again. Sometimes you had to
make do with what you found in life.
Niphone tugged on a bell pull. Down the hall, a chime sounded in a
maidservant's room. The serving woman came in to help the Empress dress. When
she was done, Maniakes rang for Kameas with a different bell pull. The
vestiarios slept in the room next to the imperial bedchamber.
"Good morning, your Majesty," the eunuch said. "Which robe shall it be today?
The red, perhaps? Or the light blue with the golden embroidery?"
"The plain dark blue will do fine," Maniakes answered.
"As you wish, of course, although the light blue would go better with the gown
your lovely Empress has chosen," Kameas said, gently inflexible. He nodded
politely to Niphone. She returned the gesture. She was modest around Kameas,
and Maniakes approved of that. He had watched the way the eunuch eyed women:
all longing, with no possibility of satisfying it. Having Kameas in the
bedchamber while Niphone robed herself would just have reminded the vestiarios
the more strongly of his condition.
"And how will you break your fast, your Majesty?" Kameas asked once Maniakes'
robe the dark blue one; he had got his own way was draped in a fashion of
which he approved. "The cook has some fine young squab, if I may offer a
suggestion."
"Yes, they'd do nicely, I think," Maniakes said. "Tell him to broil me a
couple, and to bring them to me with bread and honey and a cup of wine." He
glanced over at Niphone. "What about you, my dear?"
"Just bread and honey, I think," she answered. "These past few days, I've not
had much of an appetite."
By Maniakes' standards, she had never had much of an appetite. "Maybe you got
used to short commons in the convent of the holy Phostina," he said.
"It could be so," Niphone said indifferently. "The food here is far better,
though."
Kameas bowed to her. "I shall tell the cook as much, and tell him of your
requirements and yours, your Majesty," he added for Maniakes' benefit before
he went out the door.
After breakfast, Maniakes and Rhegorios put their heads together. His cousin
was serving as his Sevastos his chief minister for the time being. He had sent
a letter summoning the elder Maniakes and Symvatios to the capital, but it was
still on the way to Kalavria. He had also sent letters to the westlands after
his brothers, but only the lord with the great and good mind knew when or
if those letters would get to them. For now, Maniakes used the man upon whom
he could most rely.
He flapped a parchment in front of Rhegorios' face, "Look at this!" he
exclaimed rhetorically, for Rhegorios had already seen the despatch. "Imbros
sacked by the Kubratoi, half the wall pulled down, half the town burned, more
than half the people run off to Kubrat so they can grow crops for the nomads.
How am I supposed to fight off the Makuraners if the Kubratoi send everything
to the ice up in the north?"
Rhegorios sighed. "Your Majesty, you can't."
Maniakes nodded. "I'd pretty much decided the same thing for myself, but I
wanted to hear someone else say it, too." He also sighed. "That means I'll
have to buy off the khagan of the Kubratoi. I hate it, but I don't see any
other choice. I just pray old Etzilios won't want too much."
"How much is in the treasury?" Rhegorios asked. He managed a wry grin. "If you
don't know, I'll ask your father-in-law. He'd tell me, right down to the last
copper."
"The last copper is about what's there." Maniakes laughed bitterly. "No, I
take that back: there are rats' nests and spiderwebs, too. Not much in the way
of gold, though, nor even silver. I hope Skotos makes Genesios eat gold and
silver down there in the ice." He paused to spit on the floor in rejection of
the dark god, then went on, "For all I know, Genesios was eating them up here,
too, for he certainly pissed them away. Maybe Phos knows what he spent his
gold on, but I don't. Whatever it was, he got no good from it."
"And, of course, with the Makuraners raging through the westlands and the
Kubratoi raiding down almost to the walls of the city here, a lot of taxes
have gone uncollected," Rhegorios said. "That doesn't help the treasury,
either."
"Too right it doesn't," Maniakes said. "I'm worried Etzilios will decide he
can steal more than I'm able to give him."
"Or he might decide to take what you've given him and then go on stealing,"
Rhegorios put in.
"You're a cheerful soul, aren't you?" Maniakes said. "So he might. I'll offer
him forty thousand goldpieces the first year of a truce, fifty thousand the
second year, and sixty the third. That'll give him good reason to keep an
agreement all the way through to the end."
"So it will," Rhegorios said. "It will also give you more time to scrape
together the bigger sums."
"You're reading my mind," Maniakes said. "I even went over to the Sorcerers'
Collegium to see if they could conjure up gold for me. If I hadn't been
Avtokrator, they'd have laughed in my face. Now that I think on it, that makes
sense: if they could conjure up gold whenever they wanted it, they'd be rich.
No, they'd be richer than rich."
"So they would," Rhegorios said. "But tell me you didn't go there for another
reason, too: to see if they'd had any luck tracking down Genesios' pet wizard
for you."
"Can't do it," Maniakes admitted. "I wish I'd had some luck, but they've seen
no sign of him, and their sorcery can't find him, either. They don't want to
say it out loud, but I get the feeling they're scared of him. 'That terrible
old man,' one of their wizards called him, and no one knows what his name
was."
"If he's so old, maybe he dropped dead while you were taking the city, or
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