The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  “Aye, water.” Mokios gasped. He sounded more worn than the man he had just healed.

  Half a dozen villagers raced to be first to the well. Zoranne did not win the race, but the others gave way when she said, “Let me serve them. It is my right.” With the pride of a queen, she drew up the dripping bucket, untied it, and carried it to her husband and Mokios. Between them, they all but drank it dry.

  The priest was still wiping water from his mustache and beard with the sleeve of his blue robe when another woman tried to tug him to his feet. “Please, holy sir, come to my daughter,” she got out through tears. “She barely breathes!”

  Mokios heaved himself upright, grunting at the effort it took. He followed the woman. Again, the rest of the villagers followed him. Phostis touched Krispos on the shoulder. “Now we pray he can heal faster than we fall sick,” he said softly.

  Mokios succeeded again, though the second healing took longer than the first. When he was done, he lay full length on the ground, panting. “Look at the poor fellow,” Krispos whispered to his father. “He needs someone to heal him now.”

  “Aye, but we need him worse,” Phostis answered. He knelt and shook Mokios. “Please come, holy sir. We have others who will not see tomorrow without you.”

  “You are right,” the priest said. Even so, he stayed down several more minutes and, when he did rise, he walked with the shambling gait of a man either drunk or in the last stages of exhaustion.

  Krispos thought Mokios’ next healing, of a small boy, would fail. How much, he wondered, could a man take out of himself before he had nothing left? Yet in the end Mokios somehow summoned up the strength to vanquish the child’s disease. While the boy, with the resilience of the very young, got up and began to play, the healer-priest looked as if he had died in his place.

  But others in the village were still sick. “We’ll carry him if we have to,” Phostis said, and carry him they did, on to Varades.

  Again Mokios recited Phos’ creed, though now in a voice as dry as the skins of the cholera victims he treated. The villagers prayed with him, both to lend him strength and to try to ease their own fears. He sank into the healing trance, placed his hands on the veteran’s belly. They were filthy now, from the stools of the folk he had already cured.

  Once more Krispos felt healing flow out of Mokios. This time, however, the priest slumped over in a faint before his task was done. He breathed, but the villagers could not bring him back to himself. Varades moaned and muttered and befouled himself yet again.

  When they saw they could not rouse Mokios, the villagers put a blanket over him and let him rest. “In the morning, the good god willing, he’ll be able to heal again,” Phostis said.

  By morning, though, Varades was dead.

  Mokios finally roused when the sun was halfway up the sky. Videssian priests were enjoined to be frugal of food and drink, but he broke his fast with enough for three men. “Healers have dispensation,” he mumbled round a chunk of honeycomb.

  “Holy sir, so long as it gives you back the power to use your gift, no one would say a word if you ate five times as much,” Krispos told him. Everyone who heard agreed loudly.

  The priest healed two more, a man and a woman, that day. Toward sunset, he gamely tried again. As he had with Varades, though, he swooned away before the cure was complete. This time Krispos wondered if he’d killed himself until Idalkos found his pulse.

  “Just what my father worried about,” Krispos said. “So many of us are deathly ill that we’re dragging Mokios down with us.”

  He’d hoped Idalkos might contradict him, but the veteran only nodded, saying, “Why don’t you go on home and get away from the sickness for a while? You’re lucky; none of your family seems to have come down with it.”

  Krispos made the sun-sign over his heart. A few minutes later, after seeing that Mokios was as comfortable on the ground as he could be, he took Idalkos’ advice.

  He frowned as he came up to his house. Being near the edge of the village, it was always fairly quiet. But he should have heard his father and mother talking inside, or perhaps Tatze teaching Kosta some trick of baking. Now he heard nothing. Nor was cooksmoke rising from the hole in the center of the roof.

  All at once, his belly felt as if it had been pitched into a snowdrift. He ran for the door. As he jerked it open, out came the latrine stench with which he and the whole village had grown too horribly familiar over the last few days.

  His father, his mother, his sister—they all lay on the floor. Phostis was most nearly conscious; he tried to wave his son away. Krispos paid him no heed. He dragged his father to the grass outside, then Tatze and Kosta. As he did, he wondered why he alone had been spared.

  His legs ached fiercely when he bent to lift his mother, and when he went back for Kosta he found his arms so clenched with cramps that he could hardly hold her. But he thought nothing of it until suddenly, without willing it, he felt an overpowering urge to empty his bowels. He started for the bushes not far away, but fouled himself before he got to them. Then he realized he had not been spared after all.

  He began to shout for help, stopped with the cry unuttered. Only the healer-priest could help him now, and he’d just left Mokios somewhere between sleep and death. If any of the villagers who were still healthy came, they would only further risk the disease. A moment later he vomited, then suffered another fit of diarrhea. With his guts knotted from end to end, he crawled back to his family. Perhaps their cases would be mild. Perhaps…

  His fever was already climbing, so thought soon became impossible. He felt a raging thirst and managed to find a jar of wine in the house. It did nothing to ease him; before long, he threw it up.

  He crawled outside again, shivering and stinking. The full moon shone down on him, as serene and beautiful as if no such thing as cholera existed. It was the last thing Krispos remembered seeing that night.

  “OH, PHOS BE PRAISED,” SOMEONE SAID, AS IF FROM VERY FAR away.

  Krispos opened his eyes. He saw Mokios’ anxious face peering down at him and, behind the priest, the rising sun. “No,” he said. “It’s still dark.” Then the memory came crashing back. He tried to sit. Mokios’ hands, still on him, held him down. “My family!” he gasped. “My father, my mother—”

  The healer-priest’s haggard face was somber. “Phos has called your mother to himself,” he said. “Your father and sister live yet. May the good god grant them strength to endure until I recover enough to be of aid to them.”

  Then he did let Krispos sit. Krispos tried to weep for Tatze, but found the cholera had so drained his body that he could make no tears. Yphantes, now up and about, handed him a cup of water. He drank it while the priest drained another.

  He had to force himself to look at Phostis and Kosta. Their eyes and cheeks were sunken, the skin on their hands and feet and faces tight and withered. Only their harsh breathing and the muck that kept flowing from them said they were not dead.

  “Hurry, holy sir, I beg you,” Krispos said to Mokios.

  “I shall try, young man, truly I shall. But first, I pray”—he looked round for Yphantes—“some food. Never have I drained myself so.”

  Yphantes fetched him bread and salt pork. He gobbled them down, asked for more. He had eaten like that since he’d entered the village, but was thinner now than when he’d come. His cheeks, Krispos thought dully, were almost as hollow as Phostis’.

  Mokios wiped at his brow. “Warm today,” he said.

  To Krispos, the morning still felt cool. He only shrugged by way of answer; as, not long before, he had been in fever’s arms, he did not trust his judgment. He looked from his father to his sister. How long could they keep life in them? “Please, holy sir, will it be soon?” he asked, his nails digging into his palms.

  “As soon as I may,” the healer-priest replied. “Would I were younger, and recovered more quickly. Gladly would I—”

  Mokios paused to belch. Considering how much he had eaten, and how quickly, Krispos saw nothi
ng out of the ordinary in that. Then the healer-priest broke wind, loudly—as poor Varades never would again, Krispos thought, mourning the veteran with the small part of him not in anguish for his family.

  And then utter horror filled Mokios’ thin, tired face. For a moment, Krispos did not understand; the stench of incontinence by his house—indeed, throughout the village—was so thick a new addition did not easily make itself known. But when the healer-priest’s eyes went fearfully to the wet stain spreading on his robe, Krispos’ followed.

  “No,” Mokios whispered.

  “No,” Krispos agreed, as if their denial were stronger than truth. But the priest had tended many victims of the cholera, had smeared himself with their muck, had worked himself almost to death healing them. So what was more likely than a yes, or than that almost being no almost at all?

  Krispos saw one tiny chance. He seized Mokios by both shoulders; weak as he was, he was stronger than the healer-priest. “Holy sir,” he said urgently, “holy sir, can you heal yourself?”

  “Rarely, rarely does Phos grant such a gift,” Mokios said, “and in any case, I have not yet the strength—”

  “You must try!” Krispos said. “If you sicken and die, the village dies with you!”

  “I will make the attempt.” But Mokios’ voice held no hope, and Krispos knew only his own fierce will pushed the priest on.

  Mokios shut his eyes, the better to muster the concentration he needed to heal. His lips moved soundlessly; Krispos recited Phos’ creed with him. His heart leaped when, even through fever, even through sickness, Mokios’ features relaxed toward the healing trance.

  The priest’s hands moved toward his own traitorous belly. Just as he was about to begin, his head twisted. Pain replaced calm confidence on his face, and he puked up everything Yphantes had brought him. The spasms of vomiting went on and on, into the dry heaves. He also fouled himself again.

  When at last he could speak, Mokios said, “Pray for me, young man, and for your family, also. It may well be that Phos will accomplish what I cannot; not all who take cholera perish of it.” He made the sun-sign over his heart.

  Krispos prayed as he had never prayed before. His sister died that afternoon, his father toward evening. By then, Mokios was unconscious. Some time that night, he died, too.

  AFTER WHAT SEEMED FOREVER BUT WAS LESS THAN A MONTH, cholera at last left the village alone. Counting poor brave Mokios, thirty-nine people died, close to one inhabitant in six. Many of those who lived were too feeble to work for weeks thereafter. But the work did not go away because fewer hands were there to do it; harvest was coming.

  Krispos worked in the fields, in the gardens, with the animals, every moment he could. Making his body stay busy helped keep his mind from his losses. He was not alone in his sudden devotion to toil, either; few families had not seen at least one death, and everyone had lost people counted dear.

  But for Krispos, going home each night was a special torment. Too many memories lived in that empty house with him. He kept thinking he heard Phostis’ voice, or Tatze’s, or Kosta’s. Whenever he looked up, ready to answer, he found himself alone. That was very bad.

  He took to eating most of his meals with Evdokia and her husband, Domokos. Evdokia had stayed well; Domokos, though he’d taken cholera, had suffered only a relatively mild case—his survival proved it. When, soon after the end of the epidemic, Evdokia found she was pregnant, Krispos was doubly glad of that.

  Some villagers chose wine as their anodyne instead of work; Krispos could not remember a time so full of drunken fights. “I can’t really blame ’em,” he said to Yphantes one day as they both swung hoes against the weeds that had flourished when the cholera made people neglect the fields, “but I do get tired of breaking up brawls.”

  “We should all be grateful you’re here to break them up,” Yphantes said. “With your size and the way you wrestle, nobody wants to argue with you when you tell ’em to stop. I’m just glad you’re not one of the ones who like to throw their weight around to show how tough they are. You’ve got your father’s head on your shoulders, Krispos, and that’s good in a man so young.”

  Krispos stared down as he hacked at a stinging nettle. He did not want Yphantes to see the tears that came to him whenever he thought of his family, the tears he’d been too weak and too dry inside to shed the day they died.

  When he could speak again, he changed the subject. “I wonder how good a crop we’ll end up bringing in?”

  No farmer could take that question less than seriously. Yphantes rubbed his chin, then straightened to look out across the fields that were now beginning to go from green to gold. “Not very good,” he said reluctantly. “We didn’t do all the cultivating we should have, and we won’t have as many people to help in the harvest.”

  “Of course, we won’t have as many people eating this winter, either,” Krispos said.

  “With the harvest I fear we’ll have, that may be just as well,” Yphantes answered.

  Not since he was a boy in Kubrat had Krispos faced the prospect of hunger so far in advance. What with the rapacity of the Kubratoi, every winter then had been hungry. Now, he thought, he would face starvation cheerfully if only he could starve along with his family.

  He sighed. He did not have that choice. He lifted his hoe and attacked another weed.

  “UH-OH,” DOMOKOS WHISPERED AS THE TAX COLLECTOR AND his retinue came down the road toward the village. “He’s a new one.”

  “Aye,” Krispos whispered back, “and along with his clerks and his packhorses, he has soldiers with him, too.”

  He could not imagine two worse signs. The usual tax collector, one Zabdas, had been coming to the village for years; he could sometimes be reasoned with, which made him a prince among tax men. And soldiers generally meant the imperial government was going to ask for something more than the ordinary. This year, the village had less than the ordinary to give.

  The closer the new tax collector got, the less Krispos liked his looks. He was thin and pinch-featured and wore a great many heavy rings. The way he studied the village and its fields reminded Krispos of a fence lizard studying a fly. Lizards, however, did not commonly bring archers to help them hunt.

  There was no help for it. The tax collector set up shop in the middle of the village square. He sat in a folding chair beneath a canopy of scarlet cloth. Behind him, his soldiers set up the imperial icons: a portrait of the Avtokrator Anthimos and, to its left, a smaller image of his uncle Petronas.

  It was a new picture of Anthimos this year, too, Krispos saw, showing the Emperor with a full man’s beard and wearing the scarlet boots reserved for his high rank. Even so, his image looked no match for that of Petronas. The older man’s face was hard, tough, able, with something about his eyes that seemed to say he could see behind him without turning his head. Petronas was no longer regent—Anthimos had come into his majority on his eighteenth birthday—but the continued presence of his image said he still ruled Videssos in all but name.

  Along with the other villagers, Krispos bowed first to the icon of Anthimos, then to that of Petronas, and last to the fleshly representative of imperial might. The tax collector dipped his head a couple of inches in return. He drew a scroll from the small wooden case he had set beside his left foot, unrolled it, and began to read:

  “Whereas, declares the Phos-guarded Avtokrator Anthimos, from the beginning of our reign we have taken a great deal of care and concern for the common good of affairs, we have been equally concerned to protect well the state which Phos the lord of the great and good mind has granted us. We have discovered that the public treasury suffers under many debts which weaken our might and make difficult the successful prosecution of our affairs. Even matters military have been damaged by our being at a loss for supplies, with the result that the state has been harmed by the boundless onslaughts of barbarians. According to our ability, we deem the situation worthy of needed correction…”

  He went on in that vein for some time. Looking
around, Krispos watched his neighbors’ eyes glaze. The last time he’d heard rhetoric so turgid was when Iakovitzes ransomed the captive peasants from Kubrat. That speech, at least, had presaged a happy outcome. He doubted the same would be true of this one.

  From the way the soldiers shifted their weight, as if to ready themselves for action, he knew when the tax man was about to come to the unpalatable meat of the business. It arrived a moment later: “Accordingly, all assessments for the present year and until the conclusion of the aforementioned emergency are hereby increased by one part in three, payment to be collected in gold or in kind at the times and locations sanctioned by long-established custom. So decrees the Phos-guarded Avtokrator Anthimos.”

  The tax collector tied a scarlet ribbon round his proclamation and stowed it away in its case. One part in three, Krispos thought. No wonder he has soldiers with him. He waited for the rest of the villagers to join him in protest, but nobody spoke. Perhaps he was the only one who’d managed to follow the speech all the way through.

  “Excellent sir,” he said, and waited till the tax man’s eyes swung his way. “Excellent…” He waited again.

  “My name is Malalas,” the tax collector said grudgingly.

  “Excellent Malalas, we can pay no extra tax this year,” Krispos said. Once he found the boldness to speak, others nodded with him. He went on, “We would have trouble paying the usual tax. This has been a hard year for us, excellent sir.”

  “Oh? What’s your excuse?” Malalas asked.

  “We had sickness in the village, excellent sir—cholera. Many died, and others were left too weak to work for a long time. Our crop is small this year.”

  At the mention of the dread word cholera, some clerks and a few soldiers stirred nervously. Malalas, however, amazed Krispos by bursting into laughter. “Nice try, bumpkin! Name a disease to excuse your own laziness, make it a nasty one so we’ll be sure not to linger. You’d fool some with that, maybe, but not me. I’ve heard it before.”