Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 by Harry Turtledove

“In what ways do your music and ours differ?”
    Scaurus grimaced. He knew little of Roman music and less of the local variety. Worse, his vocabulary, while adequate for the barracks, had huge holes when it came to matters musical.
    At last he said, “We play—” He pantomimed a flute.
    Helvis named it for him. “We have instruments of that kind, too. What else?”
    “We pluck our stringed instruments instead of playing them with the thing your musicians use.”
    “A bow,” Helvis supplied.
    “And I’ve never seen anything like the tall box that fellow is pounding.”
    Her eyebrows lifted. “You don’t know the clavichord? How strange!”
    “He’s two days in the city, darling, and you’re tormenting him about the clavichord?” The guards’ officer Hemond came up to put his arm round Helvis’ waist with a casual familiarity that said they had been together for years.
    “I wasn’t being tormented,” Scaurus said, but Hemond dismissed his protest with a snort.
    “Don’t tell me that, my friend. If you let this one carry on about music, you’ll never get your ears back. Come on, love,” he said to Helvis, “you have to try the fried prawns. Incredible!” He was licking his lips as they walked off together.
    Marcus finished his wine in one long gulp. He was bitter and resentful, the more so because he knew his feelings had no justifiable basis. If Helvis and Hemond were a pair, then they were, and no point worrying about it. It was only that she had seemed so friendly and open and not at all attached … and she really was beautiful.
    Many Namdalener men, Hemond among them, shaved their scalps from the ears back so their heads would fit their helmets better. It was a remarkably ugly custom, the tribune decided, and felt a little better.
    Sphrantzes the Sevastos came in a few minutes later. As if his arrival was a signal—and it probably was—servants leaped forward to remove the tables of hors d’oeuvres and wine, substituting long dining tables and gilded straight-backed chairs.
    They worked with practiced efficiency and had just finished putting out the last place setting when the doorman cried, “His Majesty the Sevastokrator Thorisin Gavras and his lady, Komitta Rhangavve! Her Majesty the Princess Alypia Gavra!” Then, in the place his rank deserved, “His Imperial Majesty, Avtokrator of the Videssians, Mavrikios Gavras!”
    Marcus expected the entire room to drop to the floor and braced himself to shock everyone in it. But as the occasion was social rather than formal, the men in the hall merely bowed from the waist—the Romans among them—while the women dropped curtsies to the Emperor.
    Thorisin Gavras’ companion was an olive-skinned beauty with flashing black eyes, well matched to the hot-blooded Sevastokrator. She quite outshone the Princess Alypia, Mavrikios’ only surviving child by a long-dead wife. Her lineage was likely the reason Alypia was still unwed—she was a political card too valuable to play at once. She was not unattractive, with an oval face and eyes of clear green, rare among the Videssians. But her attention appeared directed inward, and she walked through the dining hall scarcely seeming to notice the feasters in it.
    Not so her father. “The lot of you have been standing around munching while I’ve had to work,” he boomed, “and I’m hungry!”
    Scaurus had thought he and his men would be seated with the other mercenary captains, well down the ladder of precedence. A eunuch steward disabused him of the notion. “This festivity was convened in your honor, and it would be less than appropriate were you to take your place elsewhere than at the imperial table.”
    As his knowledge of elegant Videssian manners was small, the tribune would willingly have forgone the distinction, but, of course, the gently irresistible steward had his way. Instead of soldiers, the tribune found himself keeping company with the leading nobles and foreign envoys in Videssos’