Krispos of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  That satisfied him, but not altogether. Harvas could trumpet the same claim for his conquests, no matter how vicious they were. The difference was, Harvas lied.

  "A petition for you, your Majesty," Barsymes said.

  "I'll read it," Krispos said resignedly. Petitions to the Avtokrator poured in from all over the Empire. Most of them he did not need to see; he had a logothete in aid of requests who dealt with those. But even the winter slowdown did not keep them from coming into the city, and the logothete could not handle everything.

  He unrolled the parchment His nostrils twitched, as if at the smell of bad fish. "Why didn't you tell me it was from Gnatios?"

  "Shall I discard it, then?"

  Krispos was tempted to say yes, but had second thoughts. "As long as it's in my hands, I may as well read it through." Not the smallest part in his decision was Gnatios' beautifully legible script.

  " 'The humble monk Gnatios to his imperial Majesty Krispos, Avtokrator of the Videssians: Greetings.' " Krispos nodded to himself—gone were the fawning phrases of Gnatios' first letter. Having seen they did no good, the former patriarch was wise enough to discard them. They were not his proper style anyhow. Krispos read on:

  " 'Again, your Majesty, I beg the boon of an audience with you. I am painfully aware that you have no reason to trust me and, indeed, every reason to mistrust me, but I write nonetheless not so much for my own sake as for the sake of the Empire of Videssos, whose interest I have at heart regardless of who holds the throne.' "

  That might even be true, Krispos thought. He imagined Gnatios scribbling in the scriptorium or in his own monastic cell, pausing to seek out the telling phrase that would make Krispos relent, or at least read further. He'd succeeded in the latter, if not in the former; Krispos' eyes kept moving down the parchment.

  " 'Let me speak plainly, your Majesty,' " Gnatios wrote. " 'The cause of Videssos' present crisis is rooted three hundred years in the past, in the theological controversies that followed the invasions off the Pardrayan steppe, the invasions that raped away the lands now known as Thatagush, Khatrish, and Kubrat. As a result, you will need to consider those controversies and their consequences in contemplating combat against Harvas Black-Robe.' "

  The jingling alliteration, though very much the vogue in sophisticated Videssian circles, only irritated Krispos. So did Gnatios' confident "as a result..." Of course the past shaped the present. Krispos enjoyed histories and chronicles for exactly that reason. But if Gnatios claimed the Empire's current problems were in fact three hundred years old, he also needed to say why he thought so.

  And he did not. Krispos tried to find his reasons for holding back. Two quickly came to mind. One was that the deposed patriarch was lying. The other was that he thought he had the truth, but feared to set it down on parchment lest Krispos use it and keep him mewed up in the monastery all the same.

  If that was what troubled him, he was naive—Krispos could send him back to the monastery of the holy Skirios after hearing what he had to say as easily as he could after reading his words. Gnatios was many things, Krispos thought, but hardly naive. Most likely, that meant he was lying.

  "Bring me pen and ink, please, Barsymes," Krispos said. When the eunuch returned, he took them and wrote, "I still forbid your release. Krispos Avtokrator." He gave the parchment to Barsymes. "Arrange to have this returned to the holy sir, if you would."

  "Certainly, your Majesty. Shall I reject out of hand any further petitions from him?"

  "No," Krispos said after thinking it over. "I'll read them. I don't have to do anything about them, after all." Barsymes dipped his head and carried the petition away.

  Krispos whistled between his teeth. Gnatios was everything Pyrrhos was not: he was smooth, suave, rational, and tolerant. He was also pliable and devious. Krispos had taken great and malicious glee in confining him to the monastery of the holy Skirios for a second time after Petronas' rebellion failed. Now he wondered whether Gnatios had learned enough humility in the monastery to serve as patriarch once more.

  When that occurred to him, he also wondered whether he'd lost his own mind. The monastery had changed Petronas not at all, save only to fill him with a brooding desire for vengeance. If Pyrrhos was intolerable on the patriarch throne, what would Gnatios be but intolerable in some different way? Surely it would be better to replace Pyrrhos with an amiable nonentity, the priestly equivalent of barley porridge.

  Yet somehow the idea of restoring Gnatios, once planted, would not go away. Krispos got up, still whistling, and went to the sewing room to ask Dara what she thought of it. She jabbed her needle into the linen fabric on her lap and stared up at him. "I can see why you want Pyrrhos out," she said, "but Gnatios has kept trying to wreck you ever since you took the crown."

  "I know," Krispos said. "But Petronas is dead, so Gnatios has no reason—well, less reason—for treachery now. He made Anthimos a good patriarch."

  "You should have struck off his head when he surrendered at Antigonos. Then your own wouldn't be filled with this moonshine now."

  Krispos sighed. "No doubt you're right. His petitions are probably moonshine, too."

  "What petitions?" Dara asked. After Krispos explained, her lip curled in a noblewoman's sneer. "If he knows so much about these vast secrets he's keeping, let him tell them. They'd have to be vast indeed to earn him his way out of his cell."

  "By the good god, so they would." Krispos bent down to kiss Dara. "I'll summon him and hear him out. If he has nothing, I can send him back to the monastery for good."

  "Even that's better than he deserves." Dara did not sound quite happy at having her sarcasm taken literally. "Remember where you'd be, remember where we'd all be—" She patted her belly. "—if he'd had his way."

  "I'll never forget it," Krispos promised. He made a wry face. "But I also remember what Iakovitzes told me, and Trokoundos, too: that Gnatios is no one's fool. I don't have to like him, I don't have to trust him, but I have the bad feeling that I may need him." Dara stabbed her needle into the cloth again. "I don't like it."

  "I don't either." Krispos raised his voice to call for Barsymes. When the eunuch came into the sewing room, he said, "Esteemed sir, I'm sorry, but I've changed my mind. I think I'd best talk, or rather listen, to Gnatios after all."

  "Very well, your Majesty. I shall see to it at once." Barsymes could make his voice toneless as well as sexless, but Krispos had now had years to learn to read it. He found no disapproval there. More than anything else, that convinced him he was doing the right thing.

  VIII

  Freezing rain pelted down. Gnatios shivered in his blue robe as he walked up to the imperial residence. The troop Halogai who surrounded him—Krispos was taking no chances on any schemes the ex-patriarch might have hatched—bore the nasty weather with the resigned air of men who had been through worse.

  Krispos met Gnatios just inside the entranceway to the residence. Wet and dripping, Gnatios prostrated himself on the chilly marble floor. "Your Majesty is most gracious to receive me," he said through chattering teeth.

  "Rise, holy sir, rise." Gnatios looked bedraggled enough to make Krispos feel guilty. "Let's get you dry and warm; then I'll hear what you have to say." At his nod, a chamberlain brought towels and furs to swaddle Gnatios.

  Krispos led Gnatios down the hall and into a chamber fitted out for audiences. Gnatios' step was sure, but then, Krispos remembered, he'd been here many times before. Iakovitzes waited inside the chamber. He rose and bowed as Krispos led in the former patriarch. Krispos said, "Since I intend to name Iakovitzes as Sevastos to succeed Mavros, I thought he should hear you along with me."

  Gnatios bowed to Iakovitzes. "Congratulations, your Highness, if I may anticipate your coming into your new office," he murmured.

  Iakovitzes' stylus raced over wax. He held up what he'd written so Krispos and Gnatios both could read it. "Never mind the fancy talk. If you know how to hurt Harvas, tell us. If you don't, go back to your bleeding cell."

  "That
's how it is, holy sir," Krispos agreed.

  "I am aware of it, I assure you," Gnatios said. For once his clever, rather foxy features were altogether serious. "In truth, I do not know how to hurt him, but I think I know who—'what' may be the better word—he is. I rely on your Majesty's honor to judge the value of that."

  "I'm glad you do, since you have no other choice save silence," Krispos said. "Now sit, holy sir, and tell me your tale."

  "Thank you, your Majesty." Gnatios perched on a chair. Krispos sat down beside Iakovitzes on the couch that faced it. Gnatios said, "As I have written, this tale begins three hundred years ago."

  "Go on," Krispos said. He was glad he had Iakovitzes with him. He'd enjoyed the histories and chronicles he'd read, but the noble was a truly educated man. He'd know if Gnatios tried to sneak something past.

  Gnatios said, "Surely you know, your Majesty, of the Empire's time of troubles, when the barbarians poured in all along our northern and eastern frontiers and stole so many lands from us."

  "I should," Krispos said. "The Kubratoi kidnapped me when I was a boy, and I aided Iakovitzes in his diplomatic dealings with Khatrish some years ago. I know less of Thatagush, and worry about it less, too, since its borders don't touch ours."

  "Aye, we deal with them as nations now, like Videssos if neither so old nor so mighty," Gnatios said. "But it was not always so. We had ruled for hundreds of years the provinces they invaded. We—the Empire of Videssos—had a comfortable world then. Save for Makuran, we knew no other nations, only tribes on the Pardrayan steppe and in frigid Halogaland. We were sure Phos favored us, for how could mere tribes do us harm?"

  Iakovitzes scribbled, then held up his tablet. "We found out."

  "We did indeed," Gnatios said soberly. "Within ten years of the borders being breached, a third of Videssos' territory was gone. The barbarians rode where they would, for once past the frontier they found no forces to resist them. Videssos the city was besieged. Skopentzana fell."

  "Skopentzana?" Krispos frowned. "That's no city I ever heard of." Wondering if Gnatios had invented the place, he glanced toward Iakovitzes.

  But Iakovitzes wrote, "It's ruins now. It lies in what's Thatagush these days, and the folk there still have but scant use for towns. In its day, though, it was a great city, maybe next greatest in the Empire after Videssos; in no way were more than two towns ahead of it."

  "Shall I go on?" Gnatios asked when he saw Krispos had finished reading. At Krispos' nod, he did: "As I said, Skopentzana fell. From what the few survivors wrote afterward, the sack was fearsome, with all the usual pillage and slaughter and rape magnified by the size of the city and because no one had imagined such a fate could befall him till the day. Among the men who got free was the prelate of the city, one Rhavas."

  Krispos sketched the sun-circle over his heart. "The good god must have kept him safe."

  "Under other circumstances, your Majesty, I might agree with you. As is—well, may I digress briefly?"

  "The whole business so for has seemed pretty pointless," Krispos said, "so how am I to know when you wander off the track?" The story Gnatios spun was interesting enough—the man had a gift for words—but seemed altogether unconnected to Harvas Black-Robe. If he could do no better, Krispos thought, he'd stay in his monastery till he was ninety.

  "I hope to weave my threads together into a whole garment, Majesty," Gnatios said.

  "Whole cloth, you mean," Iakovitzes wrote, but Krispos waved for Gnatios to go on.

  "Thank you, your Majesty. I know you have no special training in theology, but you must be able to see that a catastrophe like the invasion off the steppes brought crisis to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. We had believed—comfortably, again—that just as we went from triumph to triumph in the world, so Phos could not help but triumph in the universe as a whole. That remains our orthodoxy to this day—" Gnatios sketched the sun-sign. "—but it was sorely tested in those times.

  "For, you see, now so many folk made the acquaintance of misfortune and outright evil that they began to doubt Phos' power. Out of this eventually arose the Balancer heresy, which still holds sway in Khatrish and Thatagush—aye, and even in Agder by Halogaland, which though still Videssian by blood has its own king. But worse than that heresy arose, as well. As I said, Rhavas escaped the sack of Skopentzana."

  Krispos' eyebrows rose. "Worse came from the man who was prelate of an important city?"

  "It did, your Majesty. Rhavas, I gather, was connected not too distantly to the imperial house of the time, but earned his position by ability, not through his blood. He might have been ecumenical patriarch had Skopentzana not fallen, and he might have been a great one. But when he made his way to Videssos the city, he was ... changed. He had seen too much of evil when the Khamorth took Skopentzana; he concluded Skotos was mightier than Phos."

  Even Iakovitzes, whose piety ran thin, drew the sun-sign when he heard that. Krispos said, "How did the priests of the time take to that?"

  "With poor grace, as you might expect." Pyrrhos' reply would have been fierce and full of horror. Gnatios let understatement do the same job. Krispos found he preferred Gnatios' way. The scholarly monk went on, "Rhavas, though, was become as great a zealot for the dark god as he had been for Phos. He preached his new doctrine to all who would listen, first in the temples and then in the streets after the patriarch of the day banned him from the pulpit."

  Now Krispos was interested in spite of himself. "They didn't let that go on, did they?" The thought of Videssos the city filled with worshipers of evil filled him with dread.

  "No, they didn't," Gnatios said. "But because Rhavas was well connected, they had to try him publicly in an ecclesiastical court, which meant he had the privilege of defending himself against the charges they lodged. And because he was able—well, no, he was more than able; he was brilliant. I've read his defense, your Majesty. It frightens me. It must have frightened the prelates of the day, too, for they sentenced him to death."

  "I ask you again, holy sir—how does this apply to the trouble we're in now? If this Rhavas is three centuries dead, then evil as he may have become—"

  "Your Majesty, I am not at all sure Rhavas is three centuries dead," Gnatios said heavily. "I am not sure he is dead at all. He laughed when the court sentenced him, and told them they had not the power to be his death. He was left in his cell for the night, to brood on his misbelief and on the crimes he had committed in the belief they furthered his god's ends. Guards came the next morning to take him to the headsman and found the cell empty. The lock had not been tampered with, there were no tunnels. But Rhavas was gone."

  "Magic," Krispos said. The small hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck prickled erect.

  "No doubt you are right, your Majesty, but because of the nature of Rhavas' offense the cell was warded by the finest sorcerers of the day. Afterward they all took oath their wards were undisturbed. Yet Rhavas was gone."

  Iakovitzes bent over his tablet. He held it up to show what he had written. "You're saying this Rhavas is Harvas, aren't you?" He screwed up his face to show what he thought of that. But then he lowered the tablet so he could see it himself. When he raised it again, he pointed with his stylus to each name in turn.

  For a moment, Krispos had no idea what he was driving at. Harvas was an ordinary Haloga name, Rhavas an ordinary Videssian one. But was it coincidence that both of them were formed from the same letters? The renewed prickle of alarm he felt told him no.

  Gnatios stared at the two names as if he'd never seen them before. His eyes flicked from one to the other, then back again. "I didn't notice—" he breathed.

  Iakovitzes set the tablet in his lap so he could write. He passed it to Krispos, who read it aloud: " 'No wonder he wouldn't swear by Phos.' " Iakovitzes believed, too, then.

  "But if we're battling a ... a three-hundred-year-old wizard," Krispos faltered, "how do we, how can we hope to beat him?"

  "Your Majesty, I do not know. I was hoping you could tell me," Gnati
os said. His voice held no irony. Krispos was the Avtokrator. Defeating foreign foes came with the job.

  Iakovitzes wrote again. "If we do face an undying wizard who worships Skotos and hates everything Phos stands for, why hasn't he troubled Videssos long before now?"

  That made Krispos doubt again. But Gnatios answered, "How do we know he has not? By the lord with the great and good mind, your Highness, the Empire has suffered its full share of disasters over the years. How many of them might Rhavas have caused or made worse? Our ignorance of the force behind the misfortune fails to prove the force did not exist."

  "Holy sir, I think—I fear—you are right," Krispos said. Only a man—or whatever this Rhavas or Harvas was, after so long— who loved Skotos could have inflicted such brutal savagery on Imbros. And only a man who had studied sorcery for three centuries could have so baffled a clever, well-trained mage like Trokoundos. The pieces fit as neatly as those of a wooden puzzle but Krispos cringed from the shape they made.

  Gnatios said, "Now do with me as you will, your Majesty. I know you have no reason to love me, nor, truth to tell, have I any to love you. But this tale needed telling for the Empire's sake, not for yours or mine.

  "How peculiar," Iakovitzes wrote. "I thought him a man completely without integrity. Shows you can't rely on adverbs, I suppose."

  "Er, yes." Krispos handed the tablet back to Iakovitzes. When Gnatios saw he would not be invited to read Iakovitzes' comment, one eyebrow arched. Krispos ignored it. He was thinking hard. At last he said, "Holy sir, this deserves a reward, as you well know."

  "Being out of the monastery, even if but for a brief while, is reward in itself." Gnatios raised that eyebrow again. "How ever did you arrange for the most holy ecumenical patriarch of the Videssians—" Gnatios put irony in his voice with a scalpel, not a shovel, "—to acquiesce in my release?"

  "That's right, we both had to agree to it, didn't we?" Krispos grinned sheepishly. "As a matter of fact, holy sir, I forgot to ask him, and I gather an imperial summons for you was enough to overawe your abbot."