Krispos the Emperor

by Harry Turtledove

  "But beware! No mercy, not even the good god's, endures forever. Phos may yet sicken on our great glut of sins. One year—maybe one year not far from now, given the wretched state of mankind; maybe even next year; maybe even this year—one year, I say, the sun may not turn back toward the north the day after Midwinter's Day, but rather go on sinking ever southward, sinking until only a little crimson twilight remains on the horizon, and then—nothing. No light. No hope. No blessings. Forever."

  "No!" someone wailed. In an instant, the whole congregation took up the cry. Among the rest was Olyvria, her voice clear and strong. Among them, after a moment, was Phostis himself: the priest had a gift for instilling fright. Among them even was Syagrios. Phostis hadn't thought the ruffian respected Phos or feared Skotos.

  Through all the outcry, Olyvria's fingers remained laced with his. He didn't really think about that; he just accepted it gratefully. Instead of feeling alone in the cold blackness that could have come straight from Skotos, he was reminded others fought the dark with him. He needed that reminder. Never in all his years of worshiping at the High Temple had he known such fear of the dark god.

  The priest said, "With fasting and lamentation we may yet show Phos that, despite our failings, despite the corruption that springs from the bodies in which we dwell, we remain worthy of the sign of his light for yet another year, that we may advance farther down the gleaming path praised by the holy Thanasios. Pray now, and let the lord with the great and good mind know what is in your hearts!"

  If before the temple had echoed to the shouts of the congregation, now, even louder, it was filled with the worshipers' prayers. Phostis' went up with the rest. In the riches and light of the High Temple it was easy to believe, along with the ecumenical patriarch and his plump, contented votaries, that Phos would surely vanquish Skotos at the end of days. Such sublime confidence was harder to maintain in the dark of a chilly temple with a priest preaching of light draining out of the world like water from a tub.

  At first, all Phostis heard was the din of people at noisy prayer. Then, little by little, he noticed individual voices in the din. Some repeated Phos' creed over and over: Videssos' universal prayer prevailed among Thanasioi and their foes alike. Others sent up simple requests: "Give us light." "Bless my wife with a son this year, O Phos." "Make me more pious and less lustful!" "Heal my mother's sores, which no salve has aided!"

  Prayers like those would not have seemed out of place back in the High Temple. Others, though, had a different ring to them. "Destroy everything that stands in our way!" "To the ice with those who will not walk the gleaming path!" "O Phos, grant me the courage to cast aside the body that befouls my soul!" "Wreck them all, wreck them all, wreck them all!"

  He did not care for those; they might have come from the throats of baying wolves rather than men. But before he could do more than notice them, the priest at the altar raised a hand. Any motion within his candle's tiny circle of light was as-toundingly noticeable. The congregation fell silent at once, and with it Phostis' concerns.

  The priest said, "Prayer alone does not suffice. We do not walk the gleaming path with our tongues; the road that leads beyond the sun is paved with deeds, not words. Go forth now and live as Thanasios would have had you live. Seek Phos' blessings in hunger and want, not the luxuries of this world that are but a single beat of a gnat's wings against the judgment yet to come. Go forth! This liturgy is ended."

  No sooner had he spoken than acolytes bearing torches came into the worship area from the narthex to light the congregants' way out. Phostis blinked; his eyes filled with tears at what seemed the savage glare, though a moment later he realized it was not so bright after all.

  He'd dropped Olyvria's hand the instant the acolytes entered—or perhaps she'd dropped his. In more light than a single candle flame, he dared not risk angering Syagrios ... and, even more to the point, angering Livanios.

  Then palace calculation surged forward unbidden in his mind. Would Livanios throw his daughter at the heir apparent to the throne? Did he seek influence through the marriage bed? Phostis filed that away for future consideration. But no matter what Livanios intended, the feel of Olyvria's hand in his had been the only warmth he'd known, physical or spiritual, through the Thanasiot service.

  He'd thought the temple's interior cold, and so it had been. But there, at least, some hundreds of people crowded together had given a measure, albeit a small one, of animal warmth.

  Out on the night-black streets of Etchmiadzin, with the wind whipping knifelike down from the hills, Phostis rediscovered what true cold meant.

  The heavy wool cloak he wore might have been made of lace, for all the good it did to keep off the wind. Even Syagrios hissed as the blast struck him. "By the good god," he muttered, "I'd not mind jumping over a bonfire tonight, or even into one, just so as I could get warm."

  "You're right." The words were out of Phostis' mouth before he remembered to be surprised at agreeing with Syagrios about anything.

  "Fires and displays are not the way of the gleaming path," Olyvria said. "I remember them. too. from the days before my father accepted Thanasios' way. He says it's better to make your soul safe than to worry about what happens to your body."

  The priest in the temple had said the same. From him, it sank deep into Phostis' heart. From Livanios, even through Olyvria as intermediary, the words did not mean as much. The heresiarch mouthed Thanasiot slogans, but did he live by them? As far as Phostis could see, he remained sleek, well fed, and worldly.

  Hypocrite. The word tolled like a warning bell on a rocky coast. Hypocrisy was the crime of which Phostis had in his mind convicted his father, most of the capital's nobles, the ecumenical patriarch, and most of the clergy, as well. The quest for unvarnished truth was what had drawn him to the Thanasioi in the first place. Finding Livanios anything but unvarnished made him doubt the perfection of the gleaming path.

  He said, "I wouldn't mind seeing the time of the sun-turning as one of rejoicing as well as sorrow. After all, it does ensure life for another year."

  "But life in the world means life in things which are Skotos," Olyvria said. "Where's to rejoice over that?"

  "If it weren't for material things, life would come to an end, and so would mankind," Phostis countered. "Is that what you want: to fade away and vanish?"

  "Not for myself." Olyvria's shiver, like Phostis' back in the temple, had little to do with the weather. "But there are those who do want exactly that. You'll see some of them soon, I think."

  "They're daft, if you ask me," Syagrios said, though his voice lacked its usual biting edge. "We live in this world along with the next one."

  Olyvria argued that. If there was one thing Videssians would do at any excuse or none, it was argue theology. Phostis kept out of the argument, not least because he inclined to Syagrios' side of it and did not want to offend Olyvria by saying so out loud.

  The memory of her hand remained printed in his mind. It called up that other memory he had of her, the one from the chamber off the passageway under Digenis' temple back in the city. That latter memory was suited for Midwinter's Day, at least as he'd known it before. It was a time of festival, even of license. As the proverb put it, "Anything can happen on Midwinter's Day."

  Had this been a holiday of the sort with which he was familiar, he might—somewhere down deep in him, in a place below words, he knew he would—have tried to get her off by herself. And he suspected, she would have gone with him, even if only for the one night.

  But here in Etchmiadzin, seeking sensual pleasure on Midwinter's Day did not bear thinking about. Rejection was the mildest return he could expect. More likely was some sort of mortification of his flesh. Though he had increasing respect for the asceticism of the gleaming path, his flesh had lately suffered enough mortification to suit him.

  Besides, Syagrios would make a eunuch of him—and enjoy doing it—if he got himself into trouble of that sort.

  The ruffian broke off his disputation with Olyvria, s
aying, "However you care to have it, my lady. You know more about this business than me, that's for sure. All I know now is that this here poor old smashed nose of mine is going to freeze off if I don't get to somewheres with a fire."

  "There I cannot disagree with you," Olyvria said.

  "Let's us head back to the keep, then," Syagrios suggested. "It'll be warm—well, warmer—in there. 'Sides, I can dump his Majestyhood here back in his room and get me a chance to relax a bit."

  To the ice with you, Syagrios. The thought stood pure and crystalline in the center of Phostis' mind. He wanted to scream it. Only a healthy regard for his own continued survival kept him from screaming it. He was, then, at most an imperfect Thanasiot. Like Olyvria, he remained enamored of the fleshly envelope his soul wore, no matter what the source of that flesh.

  The narrow, muddy lanes of Etchmiadzin were almost pre-ternaturally dark. Night travel in Videssos the city was undertaken with torchbearers and guards, if for any legitimate purpose. Only footpads there cherished the black of night. But no one in Etchmiadzin tonight carried a light or seemed concerned over becoming a robber's victim. Cries rose into the dark sky, but they were only the lamentations the priest had commanded of his congregants.

  The bulk of the fortress and the stars it obscured helped mark the path back from the temple. Even the torches above the gates were out. Livanios went that far in adhering to the tenets of the Thanasioi.

  Syagrios grumbled under his breath. "Don't like that," he said. "Just anybody could come wandering in, and who'd be the wiser till too late?"

  "Who's in the town save our own folk and a few Vaspurakaners?" Olyvria said. "They have their own rites and leave ours alone."

  "They'd better," Syagrios replied. "More of us than there is of them."

  Only inside the keep did light return. Livanios' caftan-wearing advisor sat at a table gnawing the leg of a roasted fowl and whistling a cheery tune Phostis did not know. If he'd heard the order for fasting and lamentation, he was doing a good job of ignoring it.

  Syagrios lit a candle from a torch set in a soot-blackened sconce. With it in one hand and his knife in the other, he urged Phostis up the spiral stairway. "Back to your room now," he said. Phostis barely had time to nod to Olyvria before the twist of the stairs made her disappear.

  The corridor that led to his little chamber was midnight black. He turned to Syagrios, pointing at the candle. "May I light a lamp in my room from that?"

  "Not tonight," Syagrios said. "I got to watch you instead of roisterin', so you get no more enjoyment than me."

  Once inside, Phostis drew off his cloak and put it over the blanket on his pallet. He did not take off his tunic as he got

  under them both and huddled up in a ball to try to warm himself as fast as he could. He looked back toward the door, beyond which Syagrios surely lurked. "Roistering, is it?" he whispered. He might be a poor Thanasiot himself, but he knew a worse one.

  VII

  THE MAN'S EYES TWITCHED BACK AND FORTH IN THEIR SOCKETS. It was like no motion Phostis had ever seen before; watching made him queasy. Voice calm but weak, the man said, "I can't see you, not really, but that's all right. It goes away in a few days, I'm told by those who have come this way before me."

  "That's g-good." Phostis knew he sounded shaky. It shamed him, but he couldn't help it.

  "Fear not," the man said. He'd been introduced to Phostis as Strabon. He smiled radiantly. "Soon, I know, I shall join the lord with the great and good mind and cast aside this flesh that has too long weighed me down."

  Strabon had, Phostis thought, already cast aside almost all of his flesh. His face was a skull covered with skin; his neck seemed hardly thicker than a torch. Withered branches might have done for his arms, and claws for his hands. Not only had he no fat left on his bones, he had no muscle, either. He was bone and tendon and skin, nothing more. No, one more thing: the joy that lit his blind eyes.

  "Soon," he repeated. "It's been six weeks, a few days over, since last I polluted my soul with aliment. Only a man who was fat to begin with will last much above eight, and never was I in the habit of glutting myself. Soon I shall fare beyond the sun and look on Phos face to face. Soon."

  "Does—does it hurt?" Phostis asked. Beside him, Olyvria sat calmly. She'd seen these human skeletons before, often enough so now she was easy with the husk of Strabon.

  Syagrios had not come into the hut; Phostis heard him pacing around outside the door.

  Strabon said, "No, boy, no; as I told you, fear not. Oh, my belly panged in the early days, I'll not deny, as Skotos' part of me realized I had determined to cut my essential self free of it. But no, I feel no pain, only longing to be free." He smiled again. Save for the faintest tinge of pink, his lips were invisible.

  "But to linger so—" Phostis shook his head, though he knew Strabon could not see that. Then he blurted, "Could you not also have refused water, and so made a quicker end of it?"

  The corners of Strabon's gash of a mouth turned down. "Some of those who are most holy do as you say. Sinner that I am, I had not the fortitude for it."

  Phostis stared at him. Never in his comfortable life back at the palaces had he dreamed he'd be talking with a man in the last stages of deliberately starving himself to death. Even if he had dreamed that, could he have imagined the man would reproach himself for lack of fortitude? No; impossible.

  The lids fell over Strabon's twitching eyes; he seemed to doze. "Is he not a miracle of piety?" Olyvria whispered.

  "Well, yes, that he is." Phostis scratched his head. Back in Videssos the city, he'd despised the temple hierarchy for wearing bejeweled vestments and venerating Phos in temples built by riches taken—stolen—from the peasantry. Better, he'd thought, a simple but strong worship, one that sprang from within and demanded nothing of anyone save the single pious individual.

  Now before him he saw personified, and indeed taken to an extreme he'd never imagined, an example of such worship. He had to respect the religious impulse that had led Strabon to make himself into a collection of twigs and branches, but he was less sure he considered it an ideal.

  Yet such self-destruction was implicit in Thanasiot doctrine, for those who had the courage to follow where logic led. If the world of the senses was but a creation of Skotos', what course more logical than to remove one's precious and eternal soul from that swamp of evil and corruption?

  Rather hesitantly, he turned toward Olyvria. "However holy he may be, I'd not care to imitate him. Granted, the world is not all it might be, but leaving it this way strikes me as—oh,

  I don't know—as running away from the fight against wickedness rather than joining it."

  "Ah, but the body itself is evil, boy," Strabon said. He hadn't been asleep after all. "Because of that, any fight is foredoomed to failure." His eyes closed again.

  Olyvria spoke in a low voice. "For the many, there may be much truth in what you say, Phostis. As I told you back on Midwinter's Day, I'd not have the bravery to do as Strabon does. But I thought you ought to see him, to celebrate and admire what the soul can do if it so wills."

  "I see it," Phostis said. "It is indeed a marvel. But something to celebrate? Of that I'm less certain."

  Olyvria looked at him severely. Had she been standing, her hands would have gone onto her hips. As it was, she breathed out in exasperation. "Even the dogma you grew up with has room for asceticism and mortifying the flesh."

  "That's true," he said. "Too much care for this world and you have fat, contented priests who might as well not be priests at all. But now, seeing Strabon here, I think there may be too little care for the world, as well." His voice fell to a whisper, so he would not disturb the fitfully sleeping relic of a man. This time, Strabon did not respond.

  Phostis listened to himself with some surprise. I sound like my father, he thought. How many times, back at the palaces, had he watched and listened to Krispos steering a middle course between schemes that might have proved spectacular successes or even more spectacular disas
ters? How many times had he sneered at his father for that moderation?

  "What he does affects no one but himself," Olyvria said, "and will surely earn him eternity in communion with Phos."

  "That's true," Phostis repeated. "What he does by himself affects him alone. But if one man and one woman in four, say, decided to walk the gleaming path in his exact footprints, that would affect those who declined to do so very much indeed. And Strabon's way, if I rightly understand it, is the one Thanasiot doctrine favors."

  "For those whose spirits let them take it, yes," Olyvria said. Phostis looked from Strabon to her, then back again. He tried to envision her features ravaged by starvation, her bright eyes writhing blindly in their sockets. He'd never been the most imaginative of young men. More often than not, he felt that to be a lack. It seemed a blessing now.

  Strabon coughed himself awake. He tried to say something, but the coughs went on and on, deep wet ones that wracked the sack of bones he had become. "Chest fever," Phostis whispered to Olyvria. She shrugged. If it was, he thought, the Thanasiot zealot might be dead by evening, for how could he have any strength in his body to fight off illness?

  Olyvria stood to go. Phostis was far from sorry to get up with her. When he no longer saw the wasted figure lying on the bed, he felt more alive himself. Maybe that was illusion sprung from the animal part of him and from Skotos; he could not say. But he knew he would have trouble overcoming that animal part. Was his soul a prisoner of his body, as the Thanasioi proclaimed, or a partner with it? He would have to think long and hard on that.

  Outside Strabon's hut, Syagrios paced up and down the muddy street, whistling a tune and spitting through his uneven teeth. Phostis watched him grin and swagger. When he tried to visualize the ruffian starving himself, his thoughts ran headlong into a blank wall. He simply could not see it happening. Syagrios was an ugly specimen, but a vivid one for all that.