Krispos Rising

by Harry Turtledove

  Skombros watched, cool and contemptuous, as Krispos fumbled with it. "Do you read, groom?" he asked, not bothering to keep his voice down.

  "I read, eunuch," Krispos snapped. Nothing whatever changed in Skombros' face, but Krispos knew he had made an enemy. He finally got the parchment open. "Ten—" His voice suddenly broke, as if he were a boy. "—ten pounds of silver."

  "How fortunate of you," Skombros said tonelessly.

  Anthimos rushed up and planted a wine-soaked kiss on Krispos' cheek. "Good for you!" he exclaimed. "I was hoping you'd get a good one!"

  Krispos hadn't known there were any good ones. He stood, still dazed, as a servant brought him a fat, jingling sack. Only when he felt the weight of it in his hands did he believe the money was for him. Ten pounds of silver was close to half a pound of gold: thirty goldpieces, he worked out after a little thought.

  To Tanilis, a pound and a half of gold—108 goldpieces—had been enough to set up Krispos as a man with some small wealth of his own. To Anthimos, thirty goldpieces—and belike three hundred, or three thousand—was a party favor. For the first time, Krispos understood the difference between the riches Tanilis' broad estates yielded and those available to a man with the whole Empire as his estates. No wonder Anthimos thought nothing of a chamber pot made of gold.

  A couple of more chances were given out. One man found himself the proud possessor of ten pounds of feathers—a much larger sack than Krispos'. Another got ten free sessions at a fancy brothel. "You mean I have to pay if I want to go back a second night?" the braggart asked, whereupon the fellow who had won the feathers poured them over his head.

  Ten pounds of feathers let loose seemed plenty to fill up the room. People flung them about as if they were snow. Servants did their best to get rid of the blizzard of fluff, but even their best took a while to do any good. While most of the servitors plied brooms and pillowcases, a few brought in the next courses of food.

  Anthimos pulled a last bit of down from his beard and let it float away. He looked over toward the new trays. "Ah, beefribs in fish sauce and garlic," he said. "My chef does them wonderfully well. They're far from a neat dish, but oh so tasty."

  The ribs would be anything but neat, Krispos thought as he walked toward them—they were fairly swimming in the pungent fermented fish sauce—but they did smell good. One of the men with whom he'd hunted got to them first. The fellow picked up a rib and took a big bite.

  The rib vanished. The young noble's teeth came together with a loud click. He'd drunk enough wine that he stared foolishly at his dripping but otherwise empty hand. Then his gaze swung to Krispos. "I did have one, didn't I?" He sounded anything but sure.

  "I certainly thought you did," Krispos said. "Here, let me try." He took a rib off the tray. It felt solid and meaty in his hand. He lifted it to his mouth. As soon as he tried to bite it, it disappeared.

  Some of the people watching made Phos' sun-sign. Others, wiser in the ways of Anthimos' feasts, looked to the Avtokrator.

  A small-boy grin was on his face. "I told the cooks to make them rare, but not so rare as that," he said.

  "I suppose you're going to say you told them to get the plaster goose livers you served last time well done," someone called out.

  "Half a dozen of my friends broke teeth on those livers," the Emperor said. "This is a safer joke. Skombros thought of it."

  The eunuch looked smug and, also pleased that Krispos had been one of the people his trick had deceived. Krispos stuck his fingers in his mouth to clean them of fish sauce and juice from the ribs. What he was able to taste was delicious. He thought how unfair it was for some sneaky bit of sorcery to deprive him of the tender meat.

  He picked up another rib. "Some people," Skombros announced to no one in particular, "have more stubbornness than sense." The vestiarios settled back in his chair, perfectly content to let Krispos make as thorough a fool of himself as he wanted.

  This time, though, Krispos did not try to take a bite off the rib. He'd already seen that doing that did not work—bringing his jaws together seemed to activate the spell. Instead, he picked up a knife from the serving table and sliced a long strip of meat off each side of the bone.

  He raised one of the strips to his mouth. If the meat vanished despite his preparations, he knew he was going to look foolish. He bit into it, then grinned as he started to chew. He'd hoped cutting it off the bone would sever the spell that made it disappear.

  Slowly and deliberately, he ate all the meat he'd sliced away. Then he dealt with another rib, put the meat he'd carved from it on a small plate, and carried the plate to Anthimos. "Would you like some, your Majesty? You were right; they are very tasty."

  "Thank you, Krispos; don't mind if I do." Anthimos ate, then wiped his fingers. "So they are."

  Krispos asked, "Do you think your esteemed—" Eunuchs had a special set of honorifics that applied to them alone, "—vestiarios would care for some?"

  The Avtokrator glanced over to Skombros, who stared back stonily. Anthimos laughed. "No, he's a good fellow, but he has plenty of meat on his bones already." Krispos shrugged, bowed, and walked away, as if the matter were of no importance. He could not think of a better way to twist the knife in Skombros' huge belly.

  After Krispos showed how to eat the ribs, they vanished into the revelers rather than into thin air. Servants took away the trays. A new set of minstrels circulated through the crowd. Another erotic troupe followed them, then a group of dancers replaced the horizontal cavorters. All the acts did what they did very well. Krispos smiled to himself. Anthimos could afford the best.

  Skombros strode through the hall every so often with his crystal bowl of chances. He came nowhere near Krispos. A noble who won ten pounds of gold took his stroke of luck with enough equanimity to make Krispos sure he was already rich. Anthimos confirmed that, saying "More money for slow horses and fast women, eh, Sphrantzes?"

  "Fast horses, I hope, Majesty," Sphrantzes said amid general laughter.

  "Why should you change now?" the Avtokrator asked. Sphrantzes spread his hands, as if to admit defeat.

  Someone else chose ten peacocks for himself. Krispos wondered what peacock tasted like. But the birds the servants chivvied out were very much alive. They honked and squawked and spread their gorgeous tails and generally made nuisances of themselves. "What do I do with them?" wailed the winner, who had one bird under each arm and was chasing a third.

  "I haven't the foggiest notion," Anthimos replied with a blithe wave of his hand. "That's why I put that chance in there—to find out."

  The man ended up departing with his two birds in the hand and forgetting about the rest. After some commotion, revelers, entertainers, and servants joined in shooing the other eight peacocks out the door. " Let the Halogai worry about them," somebody said, which struck Krispos as a good enough idea.

  Once the peacocks departed—shouts from outside said the imperial guards were having their own troubles with the bad-tempered birds—the feast grew almost calm for a little while, as if everyone needed some time to catch his breath. "Well, how is he going to top that?" Krispos said to the man next to him. They were standing by a bowl of sweetened gelatin and candied fruit, but neither felt like eating; the gelatin had peacock tracks.

  "I don't know," the fellow answered, "but I expect he'll manage."

  Krispos shook his head. Then Skombros went round with his bowl again. He stopped in front of the young man whose beef rib had vanished. "Would you care for a chance, excellent Pagras?"

  "Huh?" By now, Pagras needed a moment to come out of his wine-soaked haze. He fumbled while he was getting the ball out of the bowl, and fumbled more in getting it open. He read the parchment; Krispos saw his lips move. But, instead of announcing what chance he'd chosen, he turned to Anthimos and said, "I don't believe it."

  "Don't believe what, Pagras?" the Emperor asked.

  "Ten thousand fleas," Pagras said, looking at the parchment again. "Not even you'd be crazy enough to get together ten thousand
fleas."

  At any other time, the noble might have lost his tongue for using it so freely. Anthimos, though, was drunk, too, and, as usual, a friendly drunk. "So you doubt me, eh?" was all he said. He pointed to the doorway from which a servant emerged with a large alabaster jar. "Behold: ten thousand fleas."

  "Don't see any fleas. All I see is a damn jar." Pagras lurched over to the servant and snatched it out of his hands. He yanked off the lid and stared down into the jar for several horrified seconds.

  "If you plan on counting them, Pagras, you'd better do it faster," Anthimos said.

  Pagras did not count fleas. He tried to clap the lid back on, but the jar slipped through his clumsy fingers and smashed on the marble floor. Krispos thought of a good-sized pile of ground black pepper. But this pile moved and spread without any breeze to stir it. A man yelled; a woman squealed and clapped a hand to the back of her leg.

  The revel broke up very quickly after that.

  Krispos spent the next morning scratching. Working as he did in the stables, he got fleabites fairly often, but never so many all at once as after Anthimos' feast. And he'd been one of the lucky ones, not too close to the broken jar and not too far from the door. He wondered what poor Pagras looked like—raw meat, probably.

  Petronas surprised him by dropping by not long before noon. A glance from the Sevastokrator sent stable hands scurrying out of earshot. "I understand my nephew had things hopping last night," Petronas said.

  "That's one way to put it, yes, Highness," Krispos said.

  Petronas allowed himself a brief snort of laughter before turning serious once more. "What did you think of the evening's festivities?" he asked.

  "I've never seen anything like them," Krispos said truthfully. Petronas waited without saying anything. Seeing something more was expected of him, Krispos went on, "His Imperial Majesty knows how to have a good time. I enjoyed myself, up till the fleas."

  "Good. Something's wrong with a man who can't enjoy himself. Still, I see you're here at work in the morning, too." Petronas' smile was twisted. "Aye, Anthimos knows how to have a good time. I sometimes think it's all he does know. But never mind that for now. I hear you also put a spike in Skombros' wheel."

  "It wasn't so much." Krispos explained how he'd got round the spell on the disappearing ribs.

  "I'd like to set a spell on Skombros that would make him disappear," the Sevastokrator said. "But making the fat maggot look foolish is even better than showing that he's wrong the way you did a few weeks ago. The worse he seems to my nephew, the sooner he won't be vestiarios any more. And when he's not—Anthimos heeds whichever ear is spoken into last. Things would go smoother if he heard the same thing with both of them."

  "Your voice, in other words," Krispos said. Petronas nodded. Krispos considered before he went on, "I don't see any large troubles there, Highness. From everything I've seen, you're a man of good sense. If I thought you were wrong—"

  "Yes, tell me what you would do if you thought I was wrong," Petronas interrupted. "Tell me what you would do if you, a peasant from the back of beyond jumped to head groom here only by my kindness, would do if you thought that I, a noble who has been general and statesman longer than you've been alive, was wrong. Tell me that most precisely, Krispos."

  Refusing to show he was daunted had taken Krispos a long way with Iakovitzes and Tanilis. Holding that bold front against Petronas was harder. The weight of the Sevastokrator's office and the force of his own person fell on Krispos' shoulders like heavy stones. Almost, he bent beneath them. But at the last moment he found an answer that kept his pride and might not bring Petronas' wrath down upon him. "If I thought you were wrong, Highness, I would tell you first, in private if I could. You once told me Anthimos never hears any plain speaking. Do you?"

  "Truth to tell, I wonder." Petronas gave that snort again. "Very well, there is something to what you say. Any officer who does not point out what he sees as error to his commander is derelict in duty. But one who disobeys after his commander makes up his mind ..."

  "I understand," Krispos said quickly.

  "See that you do, lad. See that you do, and one day before too long maybe you'll stop smelling of horse manure and take on the scents of perfumes and powders instead. What do you say to that?"

  "It's the best reason I've heard yet for wanting to stay in the stables."

  This time Petronas' laughter came loud and booming. "You were born a peasant, weren't you? We'll see if we can't make a vestiarios of you all the same."

  Krispos hunted with the Avtokrator, went to chariot races at the Amphitheater in the boxes reserved for Anthimos' close comrades, and attended the feasts to which he was invited. As summer moved toward fall, the invitations came more often. He always found himself among the earliest to leave the night-long revels, but he was one of the few at them who took their day work seriously.

  Anthimos certainly did not. In all the time Krispos saw him, he gave scant heed to affairs of state. Depending on who had been at him last, he would say "Go see my uncle" or "Ask Skombros about that—can't you see I'm busy?" whenever a finance minister or diplomat did gain access to him and tried to get him to attend to business. Once, when a customs agent waylaid him outside the Amphitheater with a technical problem, he turned to Krispos and asked, "How would you deal with that?"

  "Let me hear the whole thing over again," Krispos said. The customs man, glad for any audience, poured out his tale of woe.

  When he was done, Krispos said, "If I follow you rightly, you're saying that duties and road tolls at some border stations away from the sea or river transport should be lowered to increase trade through them."

  "That's exactly right, excellent—Krispos, was it?" the customs agent said excitedly. "Because moving goods by land is so much more expensive than by water, many times they never go far from the sea. Lowering duties and road tolls would help counteract that."

  Krispos thought of the Kalavrian merchants at Develtos and of the mother-of-pearl for which they had charged outrageous prices. He also thought of how seldom traders with even the most ordinary good had visited his village, of how many things he'd never seen till he came to Videssos the city. "Sounds good to me," he said.

  "So ordered!" Anthimos declared. He took the parchment from which the customs agent had been citing figures and scrawled his signature at the bottom of it. The bureaucrat departed with a glad cry. Anthimos rubbed his hands together, pleased with himself. "There! That's taken care of."

  His cronies applauded. Along with the rest of them, Krispos accompanied the Avtokrator to the next feast he'd laid on. He was troubled all through it. Problems like the one he'd handled today should have been studied, considered, not attacked on the spur of the moment—if they were attacked at all. More often than not, Anthimos did not care to bother.

  He disapproved of the Emperor for his offhandedness about such concerns, but had trouble disliking him. Anthimos would have made a fine innkeeper, he thought—the young man had a gift for keeping everyone around him happy. Unfortunately, being Avtokrator of the Videssians required rather more than that.

  Which did not stop Krispos from enjoying himself immensely whenever he was in Anthimos' company—the Emperor kept coming up with new ways to make his revels interesting. He had a whole series of feasts built around colors: one day everything was red, the next yellow, and the next blue. At that last feast, even the fish were cooked in blue sauce, so they looked as if they'd come straight from the sea.

  The Avtokrator's chances were never the same twice, either. Remembering what had happened to Pagras, the poor fellow who picked for himself "seventeen wasps" did not dare open the jar that held them. Finally Anthimos, sounding for once most imperial, had to order him to break the seal. The wasps proved to be exquisite re-creations in gold, with emeralds for eyes and delicate filigree wings.

  Krispos rarely drew a chance. Skombros kept the crystal bowl and its hollow golden balls away from him. That did not bother him. He was just glad the vestiarios did
not try slipping poison into his soup. Perhaps Skombros feared Petronas' revenge. In any case, he made do with black looks from afar. Sometimes Krispos returned them. More often he pretended not to see, which seemed to irk Skombros more.

  Such byplay went straight by Anthimos. After a while, though, he did notice that Krispos had not had his hand in the bowl for weeks. "Go on over to him, Skombros," he said one night. "Let's see how his luck is doing."

  "His luck is good, in that he enjoys your Majesty's favor," Skombros said. Nevertheless, he took Krispos the crystal bowl, thrusting it almost into his face. "Here, groom."

  "Thank you, esteemed sir." Anyone who had not seen Krispos and Skombros before would have reckoned his tone perfectly respectful. Almost hidden by fat, a muscle twitched near the eunuch's ear as he set his jaw.

  Krispos twisted open a gold ball. This was Anthimos' day for the number forty-three. The chances had already allotted forty-three goldpieces to one man, forty-three yards of silk to another, forty-three parsnips to a third. "Forty-three pounds of lead," Krispos read.

  Laughter erupted around him. "What a pity," Skombros said, just as if he meant it. A puffing servant brought out the worthless prize. The vestiarios went on, "I trust you will know what to do with it."

  "As a matter of fact, I was thinking of giving it to you," Krispos said.

  "A token of esteem? A crude joke, but then I would have expected no more from you." At last the eunuch let his scorn show.

  "No, not at all, esteemed sir," Krispos answered smoothly. "I just thought you would be used to carrying around the extra weight."

  Several people who heard Krispos took a step or two away from him, as if they'd just realized he carried a disease they might catch. He frowned, remembering his family and the all too real disease they'd taken. Skombros' anger, though, might be as dangerous as cholera. The vestiarios' face was red but otherwise impassive as he deliberately turned his broad back on Krispos.