Now she sat up in bed. Krispos thought it was the first time she took him seriously for his own sake rather than as a cog in what she'd foreseen. After a short pause, she said slowly, "Because you don't take the easy way, but look to see what may lie behind it. That is rare at any age, doubly so at yours."
This time he felt she'd touched truth, but not given him the whole of it. "Why else?" he persisted.
He wondered if his drive to know would anger her, but soon saw it did not. If anything, it raised him in her estimation; when she replied, her voice had the no-nonsense tone of someone conducting serious business. "I'll not deny that the power implied by this—" She reached out to touch the goldpiece on its chain, "—has its own attraction. In and around Opsikion, I have done everything, become everything I could hope to do and become. To set up my own son in Videssos the city, to have a connection to one who may be ... what he may be: that could tempt me almost to anything. But only almost. Reckon me hard if you like, and calculating, and cunning, but you reckon me a whore at your peril." She did not sound businesslike then; she sounded dangerous.
Krispos nodded soberly. As with Iakovitzes, his chief shield against her was stubborn refusal to acknowledge that she could daunt him. "And so?" he asked.
The light from the single lamp in the bedchamber shifted shadows on her face to underscore her every change of expression. With that aid, Krispos saw he'd gained another point. "And so," she said, "I have no interest in men who seek to bed not me but my estates; nor in those who would reckon me only a prize possession, as if I were a hound; nor again in those who care just for my body and would not mind if Skotos dwelt behind my eyes. Do you see yourself in any of those groups?"
"No," Krispos said. "But in a way don't you fall into the first one, I mean with respect to me?" Tanilis stared at him. "You dare—" He admired her for the speed with which she checked herself. After a few seconds, she even laughed. "You have me, Krispos; by my own words I stand convicted. But here I am on the other end of the bargain; and I must say it looks different from how it seemed before."
To you, maybe, Krispos thought.
Tanilis went on,"A final reason I chose you, Krispos, at least after the first time, is that you learn quickly. One of the things you still need to know, though, is that sometimes you can ask too many questions."
She reached up and drew his face down to hers. But even as he responded to her teaching, he remained sure there was no such thing as asking too many questions. Finding the right way and time to ask them might be something else again, he admitted to himself. And this, he thought before all thought left him, was probably not it.
He woke the next morning to rain drumming on the roof. He knew that sound, though he was more used to the softer plashing of raindrops against thatch than the racket they made on tile. He hoped Tanilis' peasants were done with their harvest, then laughed at himself: they were done now, whether they wanted to be or not.
Tanilis, as was her way, had slipped off during the night. Sometimes he woke when she slid out of bed; more often, as last night, he did not. He wondered, not for the first time, if her servants knew they were lovers. If so, the cooks and stewards and serving maids gave no sign of it. He had learned from Iakovitzes' establishment, though, that being discreet was part of being a well-trained servant. And Tanilis tolerated no servant who was not.
He also wondered if Mavros knew. That, he doubted. Mavros was a good many things and would likely grow to become a good many more, but Krispos had trouble seeing him as discreet.
Her hair as perfectly in place as if he had never run his hands through it, Tanilis sat waiting for him in the small dining room. "You'll have a wet ride back to Opsikion, I fear," she said, waving him to the chair opposite her.
He shrugged. "I've been wet before."
"A good plate of boiled bacon should help keep you warm on the journey, if not dry."
"My lady is generous in all things," Krispos said. Tanilis' eyes lit as he dug in.
The road north had already begun to turn to glue. Krispos did not try to push his horse. If Iakovitzes could not figure out why he was late coming back to town, too bad for Iakovitzes.
Krispos wrung out his cloak in Bolkanes' front hall, then squelched up the stairs in wet boots to see how his master was doing. What he found in Iakovitzes' room startled him: the noble was on his feet, trying to stump around with two sticks. The only sign of Graptos was a lingering trace of perfume in the air.
"Hello, look what I can do!" Iakovitzes said, for once too pleased with himself to be snide.
"I've looked," Krispos said shortly. "Now will you please get back in bed where you belong? If you were a horse, excellent sir—" He'd learned the art of turning title to reproach, "—they'd have cut your throat for a broken leg and let it go at that. If you go and break it again from falling because you're on it too soon, do you think you deserve any better? Ordanes told you to stay flat at least another fortnight."
"Oh, bugger Ordanes," Iakovitzes said.
"Go ahead, but make him get on top."
The noble snorted. "No thank you."
Krispos went on more earnestly, "I can't give you orders, excellent sir, but I can ask if you'd treat one of your animals the way you're treating yourself. There's no point to it, the more so since with the fall rains starting you're not going anyplace anyhow."
"Mrmm," Iakovitzes said—a noise a long way from any sort of agreement, but one that, when the noble changed the subject, showed Krispos he had got through.
Iakovitzes continued to mend. Eventually, as Ordanes had predicted, he was able to move about with his sticks, lifting and planting them and his splinted leg so heavily that once people in the taproom directly below his chamber complained to Bolkanes about the racket he made. Since the innkeeper was getting, if not rich, then at least highly prosperous from his noble guest's protracted stay, he turned a deaf ear to the complaints. By the time Iakovitzes could stump about the inn, the rains made sure he did not travel much farther. Outside large towns, Videssos had few paved roads; dirt was kinder to horses' hooves. The price of that kindness was several weeks of impassable soup each fall and spring. Iakovitzes cursed every day that dawned gray and wet, which meant he did a lot of cursing.
Krispos tried to rebuke him. "The rain's a blessing to farmers, excellent sir, and without farmers we'd all starve." The words were several seconds out of his mouth before he realized they were his father's.
"If you like farmers so bloody well, why did you ever leave that pissant village you sprang from?" Iakovitzes retorted. Krispos gave up on changing his master's attitude; trying to get Iakovitzes to stop cursing was like trying to fit the moon in a satchel. The noble's bad temper seemed as constant as the ever-shifting phases of the moon.
And soon enough, Krispos came to curse the fall rains, too. As Iakovitzes grew more able to care for himself, Krispos found himself with more free time. He wanted to spend as much time as he could with Tanilis, both for the sake of his body's pleasure and, increasingly, to explore the boundaries of their odd relationship. Riding even as far as her villa, though, was not to be undertaken lightly, not in the fall.
Thus he was overjoyed, one cold blustery day when the rain threatened to turn to sleet, to hear her say, "I think I will go into Opsikion soon, to spend the winter there. I have a house, you know, not far from Phos' temple."
"I'd forgotten," Krispos admitted. That night, in the privacy of the guest chamber, he said, "I hope I'll be able to see you more often if you come to town. This miserable weather—"
Tanilis nodded. "I expect you will."
"Did you—" Krispos paused, then plunged: "Did you decide to go into Opsikion partly on account of me?"
Her laugh was warm enough that, though he flushed, he did not flinch. "Don't flatter yourself too much, my—well, if I call you my dear, you will flatter yourself, won't you? In any case, I go into Opsikion every year about this time. Should anything important happen, I might not learn of it for weeks were I to stay here in
the villa."
"Oh." Krispos thought for a moment. "Couldn't you stay here and foresee what you need to know?"
"The gift comes as it will, not as I will," Tanilis said. "Besides, I like to see new faces every so often. If I'd prayed at the chapel here, after all, instead of coming into Opsikion for the holy Abdaas' day, I'd not have met you. You might have stayed a groom forever."
Reminded of Iakovitzes' jibe, Krispos said, "It's an easier life than the one I had before I came to the city." He also thought, a little angrily, that he would have risen further even if Tanilis hadn't met him. That he kept to himself. Instead, he said, "If you come to Opsikion, you might want to bring that pretty little laundress of yours—Phronia's her name, isn't it?—along with you."
"Oh? And why is that?" Tanilis' voice held no expression whatever.
Krispos answered quickly, knowing he was on tricky ground. "Because I've spread the word around that she's the reason I come here so often. If she's in Opsikion, I'll have a better excuse to visit you there."
"Hmm. Put that way, yes." Tanilis' measuring gaze reminded Krispos of a hawk eyeing a rabbit from on high. "I would not advise you to use this story to deceive me while you carry on with Phronia. I would not advise that at all."
A chill ran down Krispos' spine, though he had no interest in Phronia past any young man's regard for a pretty girl. Since that was true, the chill soon faded. What remained was insight into how Tanilis thought. Krispos' imagination had not reached to concealing one falsehood within another, but Tanilis took the possibility for granted. That had to mean she'd seen it before, which in turn meant other people used such complex ploys. Something else to look out for, Krispos thought with a silent sigh.
"What was that for?" Tanilis asked.
Wishing she weren't so alert, he said, "Only that you've taught me many things."
"I've certainly intended to. If you would be more than a groom, you need to know more than a groom."
Krispos nodded before the full import of what she'd said sank in. Then he found himself wondering whether she'd warned him about Phronia just to show him how a double bluff worked. He thought about asking her but decided not to. She might not have meant that at all. He smiled ruefully. Whatever else she was doing, she was teaching him to distrust first impressions ... and second ... and third... . After a while, he supposed, reality might disappear altogether, and no one would notice it was gone.
He thought of how Iakovitzes and Lexo had gone back and forth, quarreling over what was thought to be true at least as much as over what was true. To prosper in Videssos the city, he might need every bit of what Tanilis taught.
Since Opsikion lay by the Sailors' Sea, Krispos thought winter would be gentler there. The winter wind, though, was not off the sea, but from the north and west; a breeze from his old home, but hardly a welcome one.
Eventually the sea froze, thick enough for a man to walk on, out to a distance of several miles from shore. Even the folk of Opsikion called that a hard winter. To Krispos it was appalling; he'd seen frozen rivers and ponds aplenty, but the notion that the sea could turn to ice made him wonder if the Balancer heretics from Khatrish might not have a point. The broad, frigid expanse seemed a chunk of Skotos' hell brought up to earth.
Yet the locals took the weather in stride. They told stories of the year an iceberg, perhaps storm-driven from Agder or the Haloga country, smashed half the docks before shattering against the town's seawall. And the eparch Sisinnios sent armed patrols onto the ice north of the city.
"What are you looking for, demons?" Krispos asked when he saw the guardsmen set out one morning. He laughed nervously. If the frozen sea was as much Skotos' country as it appeared, demons might indeed dwell there.
The patrol leader laughed, too. He thought Krispos had been joking. "Worse than demons," he said, and gave Krispos a moment to stew before he finished: "Khatrishers."
"In this weather?" Krispos wore a squirrelskin cap with ear-flaps. It was pulled down low on his forehead. A thick wool scarf covered his mouth and nose. The few square inches of skin between the one and the other had long since turned numb.
The patrol leader was similarly muffled. His breath made a steaming cloud around him. "Grab a spear and come see for yourself," he urged. "You're with the chap from the city, right? Well, you can tell him some of what we see around here."
"Why not?" A quick trip back to the armory gave Krispos a spear and a white-painted shield. Soon he was stumbling along the icy surface of the sea with the troopers. It was rougher, more irregular ice than he'd expected, almost as if the waves had frozen instead of breaking.
"Always keep two men in sight," said the patrol leader, whose name, Krispos learned, was Saborios. "You get lost out here by yourself—well, you're already on the ice, so where will your soul end up?" Krispos blew out a smoky sigh of relief to discover he was not the only one who had heretical thoughts.
The guardsmen paid attention to what they were doing, but it was a routine attention, making sure they did nothing they knew to be foolish. It left plenty of room for banter and horseplay. Krispos trudged on grimly in the middle of the line. With neither terrain nor risks familiar to him, he had all he could do just to keep pace.
"Good thing it's not snowing," one of the troopers said. "If it was snowing, the Khatrishers could sneak an army past us and we'd never know the difference."
"We would when we got back," another answered. The first guard chuckled.
Everything looked the same to Krispos; sky and frozen sea and distant land all were shades of white and gray. Anything colorful, he thought, should have been visible for miles. What had not occurred to him was how uncolorful a smuggler could become.
Had the trooper to Krispos' left not almost literally stumbled over the man, they never would have spied him. Even then, had he stayed still, he might have escaped notice: he wore white foxskins and, when still, was invisible past twenty paces. But he lost his head and tried to run. He was no better at it on the slippery ice than his pursuers, who soon ran him down.
Saborios held out a hand to the Khatrisher, who had gone so far as to daub white greasepaint on his beard and face. "You don't by any chance have your import license along, do you?" the patrol leader asked pleasantly. The Khatrisher stood in glum silence. "No, eh?" Saborios said, almost as if really surprised. "Then let's have your goods."
The smuggler reached under his jacket, drew out a leather pouch.
The patrol leader opened it. "Amber, is it? Very fine, too. Did you give me all of it? Complete confiscation, you know, is the penalty for unlicensed import."
'"That's everything, curse you," the Khatrisher said sullenly.
"Good." Saborios nodded his understanding. "Then you won't mind Domentzios and Bonosos stripping you. If they find you've told the truth, they'll even give you back your clothes."
Krispos was shivering in his furs. He wondered how long a naked man would last on the ice. Not long enough to get off it again, he was sure. He watched the smuggler make the same unhappy calculation. The fellow took a pouch from each boot. The patrol leader pocketed them, then motioned forward the two troopers he had named. They were tugging off the Khatrisher's coat when he exclaimed, "Wait!"
The imperials looked to the patrol leader, who nodded. The smuggler shed his white fox cap. "I need my knife, all right?" he said. Saborios nodded again. The smuggler cut into the lining, extracted yet another pouch. He threw down the dagger. "Now you can search me."
The troopers did. They found nothing. Shivering and swearing, the Khatrisher dove back into his clothes. "You might have got that last one by us," Saborios remarked.
"That's what I thought," the smuggler said through chattering teeth. "Then I thought I might not have, too."
"Sensible," Saborios said. "Well, let's take you in. We've earned our pay for today, I think."
"What will you do with him?" Krispos asked as the patrol turned back toward Opsikion.
"Hold him for ransom," Saborios answered. "Nothing e
lse we can do, now that I've seen he's smuggling amber. Gumush will pay to have him back, never fear." Krispos made a questioning noise. Saborios explained, "Amber's a royal monopoly in Khatrish. The khagan likes to see if he can avoid paying our tariffs every so often, that's all. This time he didn't, so we get some for free."
"Does he sneak in enough to make it worth his while?"
"That's a sharp question—I thought you were Iakovitzes' groom, not his bookkeeper. The only answer I know is, he must think so or he wouldn't keep doing it. But not this run, though." The patrol leader's eyes, almost the only part of his face visible, narrowed in satisfaction.
Iakovitzes howled with glee when Krispos told him the story that evening. They were sitting much closer than usual to Bolkanes' big fire; Krispos had a mug of hot spiced wine close at hand. He smiled gratefully when one of the barmaids refilled it. Iakovitzes said. "It'll serve Gumush right. Nothing I enjoy more than a thief having to pay for his own thievery."
"Won't he just raise the price later on to make up for it?' Krispos asked. "The legitimate price, I mean."
"Probably, probably," Iakovitzes admitted. "But what do I care? I don't much fancy amber. And no matter how hard hesqueezes, the world doesn't hold enough gold for him to buy his way out of embarrassment." Contemplating someone else's discomfiture would put Iakovitzes in a good mood if anything would.
A couple of nights later, Tanilis proved coldly furious that the amber had been seized. "I made the arrangements for it myself with Gumush," she said. "Four parts in ten off the going rate here, which still allowed him a profit, seeing as the tariff is five parts in ten. He already has half the money, too. Do you suppose he'll send it back when he ransoms his courier?" Her bitter laugh told how likely that was.
"But ..." Krispos scratched his head. "The Avtokrator needs the money from the tariffs, to pay for soldiers and furs and roads and—"
"And courtesans and fine wines and fripperies," Tanilis finished for him; she sounded as scornful of Anthimos III as Pyrrhos had. "But even if it were only as you say, I need money, too, for the good of my own estates. Why should I pay twice as much for amber as I need to for the sake of a handful of rich men in Videssos the city who do nothing for me?"
Krispos Rising Page 17
