Krispos the Emperor

by Harry Turtledove

  "So what did you think of the boneyard?" he asked Phostis, spitting again.

  Olyvria rounded on him, tight black curls flying in fury. "Show proper respect for the pious and holy Strabon!" she blazed.

  "Why? Soon enough he'll be dead, and then it'll be up to Phos, not to the likes of me, to figure out what he deserves."

  Olyvria opened her mouth, then closed it again. Phostis made a mental note that Syagrios, while indubitably uncouth, was far from stupid. Too bad, he thought. Aloud, he said, "If a few people choose to make their end that way, I don't see that it much matters to the world around them—and, as Olyvria says, they are pious and holy. But if many decide to end their lives, the Empire will shake."

  "And why shouldn't the Empire shake, pray?" Olyvria asked.

  Now Phostis had to pause and consider. An unshaken Empire of Videssos was almost as much of an article of faith for him as Phos' creed. And why not? For seven centuries and more, Videssos had given folk in a great swathe of the world reasonable peace and reasonable security. True, there had been disasters, as when steppe nomads took advantage of Videssian civil war to invade the north and east and form their own khaganates in the ruins of imperial provinces. True, every generation or two fought another in the long string of debilitating wars with Makuran. But, on the whole, he remained convinced life within the Empire was likelier to be happy than anywhere outside it.

  But when he said as much, Olyvria answered, "So what? If life in this world is but part of Skotos' trap, what matter if you're happy as the jaws close? Better then that we should be unhappy, that we should recognize everything material as part of the lure that draws us down to the ice."

  "But—" Phostis felt, himself floundering. "Suppose— hmm—suppose everyone in the westlands, or most people, starved themselves to death like Strabon. What would happen after that? The Makuraners would march in unopposed and rule the land forever."

  "Well, what if they did?" Olyvria said. "The pious men and women who'd abandoned the world would be safe in Phos' heaven, and the invaders would surely go to the ice when their days were done."

  "Yes, and the worship of Phos would go out of the world, for the Makuraners reverence their Four Prophets, not the good god," Phostis said. "No one who worshiped Phos would be left, and Skotos would have the victory in this world. The realm beyond the sun would gain no new recruits, but the dark god would have to carve new caverns into the ice." He spat in ritual rejection of Skotos.

  Olyvria frowned. The very tip of her tongue poked out of her mouth for a moment. Her voice was troubled as she said, "This argument has more weight than I would have looked for."

  "No it don't," Syagrios said with a raucous laugh. "The two of you's quarreling over whether you'd like your cow's eggs better poached or fried. Truth is, a cow ain't about to lay no eggs—and whole flocks of people ain't about to starve themselves to death, neither. Come to that, is either one o' you ready to stop eatin' yet?"

  "No," Olyvria said quietly. Phostis shook his head.

  "Well, then," Syagrios said, and laughed even louder.

  "But if you're not ready to leave the world behind, how can you be a proper Thanasiot?" Phostis asked with the relentless logic of the young.

  "That's a bloody good question." Syagrios whacked Phostis on the back, almost hard enough to knock him sprawling into the muck that passed for a street. "You ain't as dumb as you look, kid." The day was gloomy, the sky an inverted bowl full of thick gray clouds. The gold ring in Syagrios' ear glinted nonetheless. In Etchmiadzin he did not wear it to deceive those not of his faith, for the Thanasioi ruled the town. But he did not take it out, either.

  "Syagrios, to say one can be a good Thanasiot only through starvation contradicts the faith as the holy Thanasios set it forth, which you know perfectly well." Olyvria sounded as if she were holding onto patience with both hands.

  Syagrios caught the warning in her voice. Suddenly he reverted to being a guardsman rather than an equal. "As you say. my lady," he answered. Had Phostis told him the same thing, the ruffian would have torn into him in argument and likely j with fists and booted feet, as well.

  But Phostis, though prisoner in Etchmiadzin, was not Olyvria's servitor. Moreover, he actively enjoyed theological disputation. Turning to Olyvria, he said, "But if you choose to live in Skotos' world, surely you compromise with evil, and compromise with evil takes you to the ice, not so?"

  "But not everyone is or can be suited to leaving the world of his own will," Olyvria said. "The holy Thanasios teaches that those who feel they must remain in Skotos' realm may yet gain merit along two byroads of the gleaming path. In one, they may lessen the temptations of the material for themselves and for those around them."

  "Those who follow that byroad would be the men your father leads," Phostis said.

  Olyvria nodded. "Them among others. But it is also virtuous to content yourself with simple things: black bread instead of white, coarse cloth rather than fine. The more you do without, the less you subject yourself to Skotos."

  "Yes, I see the point," Phostis said slowly. The more you burn and destroy, also, he thought, but kept that to himself. Instead of mentioning it, he asked, "What is the second byroad you spoke of?"

  "Why, ministering to those who have chosen the path of greater abnegation," Olyvria answered. "By helping them as they advance along the gleaming path, those who stay behind bask in their reflected piety, so to speak."

  "Hmm," Phostis said. At first hearing, that sounded good. But after a moment, he said, "How does that make their dealings with those of greater holiness different from any peasant's dealings with a noble?"

  Olyvria gave him an exasperated glare. "It's different because the usual run of noble wallows in corruption, thinking mostly of his purse and his, ah, member, and so a peasant who serves such a man is but drawn deeper into the sensual mire. But our pious heroes reject all the lures of the world and inspire others to do likewise to the degree that is in their power."

  "Hmm," Phostis said again. "Something to that, I suppose." He wondered how much. A good noble of the non-Thanasiot sort helped the peasants on his land get through hard times, defended them against raiders if he lived near a frontier, and didn't go around seducing their women. Phostis knew a good many nobles, and knew of a good many more. He wondered how maintaining one's dependents rated against the individual pursuit of piety. The good god knew for certain, but Phostis doubted whether anyone merely human did.

  Before he could say as much, a familiar figure from Livanios' miniature court at the keep came stamping up the street: the fellow who seemed to be the heresiarch's chief wizard. Despite all his time in Etchmiadzin, Phostis still had not learned the man's name. Now he wore a thick wool caftan with bright vertical stripes, and on his head a fur cap with ear-flaps that might have come straight off the plains of Pardraya.

  He touched his forehead, lips, and chest in greeting to Olyvria, gave Phostis a measuring stare, and ignored Syagrios. "He's going into Strabon's house," Phostis said. "What does he want with someone who likely won't be here two weeks from now and may riot be here tomorrow?"

  "He visits everyone he can who chooses to leave the world of evil things," Olyvria answered. "I don't know why; if he's as curious as most mages, perhaps he seeks to learn as much as he can about the world to come while still remaining in this one."

  "Maybe." Phostis supposed one did not cease to be a mage, or a tanner, or a tailor, on becoming a Thanasiot. "What is he called, anyhow?"

  Olyvria paused visibly before she answered. Syagrios stepped into the breach: "He doesn't like people knowin' his name, for fear they'll work magic with it."

  "That's silly. He must not be much of a wizard, then," Phostis said. "My father's chief mage is named Zaidas, and he doesn't care who knows it. He says if you can't protect yourself from name magic, you have no business taking up sorcery in the first place."

  "Not all wizards have the same ways," Olyvria said. Since that was too obviously true to require comment, Phostis le
t it go.

  The fellow in the caftan came out of Strabon's house a couple of minutes later. He did not look happy, and was muttering under his breath. Not all the muttering sounded like Videssian; Phostis wondered if he was from nearby Vaspurakan. Of what was in the imperial language, Phostis caught only one phrase: "Old bastard's not ripe yet." The wizard stalked away.

  "Not ripe yet?" Phostis said after he'd rounded a corner. "Not ripe for what?"

  "I don't know," Syagrios said. "Me, I don't mess with mages or their business and I don't want them messin' with me."

  That was a sensible attitude for anyone, and especially, Phostis thought, for somebody like Syagrios, who was likely to be "messed with" by mages when said mages were on the track of objects mysteriously vanished. Phostis smiled at his automatic contempt for the bruiser who'd become his keeper. Syagrios saw the smile and gave him a hard, suspicious stare. He did his best to look innocent, which was rendered more difficult because he was guilty.

  Syagrios changed the subject. "How's about we go find some food? Standin' on my pins all mornin', me, I could hack steaks off a donkey and eat 'em raw."

  "Get out of here, you beast! Out of my sight!" Olyvria snarled, her voice breaking with fury. "Out! Away! How dare you—how could you be so dense, so blockheaded—as to talk about food after we've just seen the pious Strabon dedicating himself to escaping the world and advancing along the gleaming path? Get out!"

  "No," Syagrios said. "Your father told me to keep an eye on this one—" He pointed at Phostis. "—and that there's just what I aim to do."

  Up till then, that stolid remark had been proof against anything Olyvria would throw at it. Indeed, Olyvria had not tried to contest it. Now, though, she said, "Where will he go? Do you think he'll kidnap me?"

  "I don't know and I don't care," Syagrios answered. "I just know what I got told to do."

  "Well, I tell you to go away. I can't abide the sight or sound of you after what you just said," Olyvria said. When he shook his head, she added, "If you don't, I'll tell my father what you said just now. Do you want to undergo the penance you'd receive for mocking the holy faith?"

  "I didn't," Syagrios said, but he seemed suddenly doubtful. Whether he had or he hadn't, Livanios was apt to believe Olyvria rather than him. It was most unfair. All at once, Phostis understood why he himself had not had many friends as a boy. If he ran to tell his father about a quarrel, his father was the Avtokrator. If the Avtokrator—or Livanios now—ruled against you, to whom could you appeal?

  Bitterness gusted through Phostis. The Avtokrator, in those lost boyhood days, was only too likely to rule against him, not for. His father had never truly warmed to him; from time to time he wondered what he'd done wrong, to make Krispos find fault with everything about him. He doubted he'd ever find out.

  Olyvria said to Syagrios, "Go on, I tell you. I'll be responsible for seeing Phostis doesn't run out of Etchmiadzin. And I tell you this, too: if you say me nay once more, you'll be sorry for it."

  "All right, then, my lady." The ruffian turned what should have been a title of respect into one of reproach. "On you the blame, and almost I hope you end up wearing it." Syagrios strode off with the straight, proud back of a man who's had the last word.

  Watching him go, Phostis felt a burden lift from his spirit, as if the sun had come out to brighten a gloomy day. He also had to stifle a burst of laughter. In spite of having just come out of starving Strabon's house, he was hungry.

  Since unlike Strabon he was not about to waste away and die of hunger, he kept that to himself. He didn't want Olyvria rounding on him as she had on Syagrios. If anything was more likely to bring back the watchdog, he couldn't imagine what it might be.

  Olyvria was looking at him with a quizzical expression. He realized she was left as much at a loss by Syagrios' departure as was he. "What shall we do now?" she asked, perhaps hoping he could think of something.

  Unfortunately, he couldn't. "I don't know," he answered. "I really haven't seen enough of Etchmiadzin to know what you can do around here." Not much before the Thanasioi took over the town, and less now, he guessed.

  "Let's just amble about, then, and see where our feet take us," she said.

  "That's all right with me." Short of a trip to the torturer, anything Olyvria suggested would have been all right with Phostis. He looked for grass to sprout in the streets, flowers to burst into bloom, and birds to start singing in winter, all because she'd managed to outbluff Syagrios.

  Their feet led them to a street of dyers. That the men there followed the gleaming path didn't keep their shops from smelling of stale piss, just like the establishments of perfectly orthodox dyers back in Videssos the city. In the same way, Thanasiot carpenters had hands crisscrossed with scars and Thanasiot bakers faces permanently reddened from peering into hot ovens.

  "It all seems so—ordinary," Phostis said after a while. Dull was the other word that came to mind, but he suppressed it. "For most folk, it's as if being a Thanasiot doesn't change much in their lives."

  That bothered him. To his way of thinking, heresy and orthodoxy—whichever was which in this dispute—should have been easy to tell apart at a glance. But, on further reflection, he wondered why. Unless they chose Strabon's path out of the world, the Thanasioi had to make their way in it, and only so many ways of doing that were possible. The dyeshops probably stank of urine in Mashiz, too; carpenters would sometimes gouge themselves with chisels; and bakers would need to make sure their loaves didn't burn.

  Olyvria said, "The difference is the gleaming path, it's standing aside from the world as well as one can, not thinking riches the only end in life, seeking to satisfy the spirit rather than the baser impulses of the body."

  "I suppose so," Phostis said. They walked a little farther while he ruminated on that. Then he said, "May I ask you something? For all the ribbons on my cage, I know I'm pretty much a prisoner here, so I don't mean to make you angry, but there is something I'd like to learn, if giving the answer doesn't offend you."

  Olyvria turned toward him. Her eyes were wide with curiosity, her mouth slightly open. She looked very young, and very lovely. "Ask," she said at once. "You're here to learn about the gleaming path, after all. How will you learn if you don't ask?"

  "All right, I will." Phostis thought for a little while; the question he had in mind needed to be framed carefully. At last he said, "In the room in the tunnel under Digenis' temple, what you said there—"

  "Aha!" Olyvria stuck out her tongue at him. "I thought it would be something about that, just from the way you went all around it like a man feeling for a goldpiece in the middle of a nettle patch."

  Phostis felt his face heat. By the way Olyvria giggled, his embarrassment was also plain to the eye. Even so, he stubbornly plowed ahead; in some ways—though he would have hotly denied it—he was very much like Krispos. "What you said under there, when you tried to lure me to you, about the pleasure of love being sweet, and no sin?"

  "What about it?" Olyvria lost some—though not all—of her mischievous air as she saw how serious he was.

  What he really wanted to ask was how she knew—or, even more to the point, what she would have done had he lain down on the bed beside her and taken her in his arms. But he did not think he was in a position where he could safely put either of those questions. So instead he said, "If you hold to Thanasios' gleaming path as strongly as you say, how could you make such a claim? Doesn't it go straight against everything you profess to believe?"

  "I could answer that any number of ways," Olyvria said. "I could tell you, for instance, that it was none of your business."

  "So you could, and I would beg your pardon," he said. "I said from the start that I didn't want to offend you."

  Olyvria went on as if he had not spoken: "Or I could say I was doing as Digenis and my father bade me do, and trusted them to judge the rights and wrongs of it." Her eyes twinkled again. He knew she was toying with him, but what could he do about it?

  "Or," she wen
t on, maddeningly disingenuous, "I could say Thanasios countenanced dissimulation when it serves spreading the truth, and that you have no idea what my true feelings on the subject are."

  "I know I don't. That's what I was trying to find out, your true feelings on the subject." Phostis felt like an old, spavined plowhorse trying to trap a dragonfly without benefit of net. He tramped on, straight ahead, while Olyvria flitted, evaded, and occasionally flew so close to the end of his nose that his eyes crossed when he tried to see her clearly.

  "Those are just some examples of what I might say," she noted, ticking them off on her fingertips. "If you'd like others, I might also say—"

  As if the old plowhorse suddenly snorted and startled the beautiful, glittering insect, he broke in, "What would you say that's so, by the good god?"

  "I'd say—" But then Olyvria shook her head and looked away from him. "No, I wouldn't say anything at all, Phostis. Better if I don't."

  He wanted to shake truth from her, but she was not a salt cellar. "Why?" he howled, months of frustration boiled into a single despairing word.

  "Just—better if I don't." Olyvria still held her head averted. In a small voice, she added, "I think we ought to go back to the fortress now."

  Phostis didn't think that, nor anything like it, but walked with her all the same. In the inner ward stood Syagrios, talking with someone almost as disreputable-looking as he was. The ruffian left his—partner in crime?—ambled over, and attached himself to Phostis like a shadow returning from a brief holiday. In an unsettling sort of way, Phostis was almost glad to have him back. He'd certainly made a hash of his first little while in Etchmiadzin on his own.

  Digenis' robe had fallen open, displaying ribs like ladder rungs. His thighs were thinner than his knees. Even his ears seemed to be wasting away. But his eyes still blazed defiance. "To the ice with you, your false Majesty," he growled when Krispos came into his cell. "Your way would have sent me beyond the sun quicker, but I gain, I gain."

  To Krispos, the firebrand priest looked more as if he lost. Lean to begin with, now he looked like a peasant in a village after three years of blighted crops. But for those eerily compelling eyes, he might have been a skeleton that refused to turn back into a man.