The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’d forgotten,” Krispos admitted. That night, in the privacy of the guest chamber, he said, “I hope I’ll be able to see you more often if you come to town. This miserable weather—”

  Tanilis nodded. “I expect you will.”

  “Did you—” Krispos paused, then plunged: “Did you decide to go into Opsikion partly on account of me?”

  Her laugh was warm enough that, though he flushed, he did not flinch. “Don’t flatter yourself too much, my—well, if I call you my dear, you will flatter yourself, won’t you? In any case, I go into Opsikion every year about this time. Should anything important happen, I might not learn of it for weeks were I to stay here in the villa.”

  “Oh.” Krispos thought for a moment. “Couldn’t you stay here and foresee what you need to know?”

  “The gift comes as it will, not as I will,” Tanilis said. “Besides, I like to see new faces every so often. If I’d prayed at the chapel here, after all, instead of coming into Opsikion for the holy Abdaas’ day, I’d not have met you. You might have stayed a groom forever.”

  Reminded of Iakovitzes’ jibe, Krispos said, “It’s an easier life than the one I had before I came to the city.” He also thought, a little angrily, that he would have risen further even if Tanilis hadn’t met him. That he kept to himself. Instead, he said, “If you come to Opsikion, you might want to bring that pretty little laundress of yours—Phronia’s her name, isn’t it?—along with you.”

  “Oh? And why is that?” Tanilis’ voice held no expression whatever.

  Krispos answered quickly, knowing he was on tricky ground. “Because I’ve spread the word around that she’s the reason I come here so often. If she’s in Opsikion, I’ll have a better excuse to visit you there.”

  “Hmm. Put that way, yes.” Tanilis’ measuring gaze reminded Krispos of a hawk eyeing a rabbit from on high. “I would not advise you to use this story to deceive me while you carry on with Phronia. I would not advise that at all.”

  A chill ran down Krispos’ spine, though he had no interest in Phronia past any young man’s regard for a pretty girl. Since that was true, the chill soon faded. What remained was insight into how Tanilis thought. Krispos’ imagination had not reached to concealing one falsehood within another, but Tanilis took the possibility for granted. That had to mean she’d seen it before, which in turn meant other people used such complex ploys. Something else to look out for, Krispos thought with a silent sigh.

  “What was that for?” Tanilis asked.

  Wishing she weren’t so alert, he said, “Only that you’ve taught me many things.”

  “I’ve certainly intended to. If you would be more than a groom, you need to know more than a groom.”

  Krispos nodded before the full import of what she’d said sank in. Then he found himself wondering whether she’d warned him about Phronia just to show him how a double bluff worked. He thought about asking her but decided not to. She might not have meant that at all. He smiled ruefully. Whatever else she was doing, she was teaching him to distrust first impressions…and second…and third…. After a while, he supposed, reality might disappear altogether, and no one would notice it was gone.

  He thought of how Iakovitzes and Lexo had gone back and forth, quarreling over what was thought to be true at least as much as over what was true. To prosper in Videssos the city, he might need every bit of what Tanilis taught.

  SINCE OPSIKION LAY BY THE SAILORS’ SEA, KRISPOS THOUGHT winter would be gentler there. The winter wind, though, was not off the sea, but from the north and west; a breeze from his old home, but hardly a welcome one.

  Eventually the sea froze, thick enough for a man to walk on, out to a distance of several miles from shore. Even the folk of Opsikion called that a hard winter. To Krispos it was appalling; he’d seen frozen rivers and ponds aplenty, but the notion that the sea could turn to ice made him wonder if the Balancer heretics from Khatrish might not have a point. The broad, frigid expanse seemed a chunk of Skotos’ hell brought up to earth.

  Yet the locals took the weather in stride. They told stories of the year an iceberg, perhaps storm-driven from Agder or the Haloga country, smashed half the docks before shattering against the town’s seawall. And the eparch Sisinnios sent armed patrols onto the ice north of the city.

  “What are you looking for, demons?” Krispos asked when he saw the guardsmen set out one morning. He laughed nervously. If the frozen sea was as much Skotos’ country as it appeared, demons might indeed dwell there.

  The patrol leader laughed, too. He thought Krispos had been joking. “Worse than demons,” he said, and gave Krispos a moment to stew before he finished: “Khatrishers.”

  “In this weather?” Krispos wore a squirrelskin cap with earflaps. It was pulled down low on his forehead. A thick wool scarf covered his mouth and nose. The few square inches of skin between the one and the other had long since turned numb.

  The patrol leader was similarly muffled. His breath made a steaming cloud around him. “Grab a spear and come see for yourself,” he urged. “You’re with the chap from the city, right? Well, you can tell him some of what we see around here.”

  “Why not?” A quick trip back to the armory gave Krispos a spear and a white-painted shield. Soon he was stumbling along the icy surface of the sea with the troopers. It was rougher, more irregular ice than he’d expected, almost as if the waves had frozen instead of breaking.

  “Always keep two men in sight,” said the patrol leader, whose name, Krispos learned, was Saborios. “You get lost out here by yourself—well, you’re already on the ice, so where will your soul end up?” Krispos blew out a smoky sigh of relief to discover he was not the only one who had heretical thoughts.

  The guardsmen paid attention to what they were doing, but it was a routine attention, making sure they did nothing they knew to be foolish. It left plenty of room for banter and horseplay. Krispos trudged on grimly in the middle of the line. With neither terrain nor risks familiar to him, he had all he could do just to keep pace.

  “Good thing it’s not snowing,” one of the troopers said. “If it was snowing, the Khatrishers could sneak an army past us and we’d never know the difference.”

  “We would when we got back,” another answered. The first guard chuckled.

  Everything looked the same to Krispos; sky and frozen sea and distant land all were shades of white and gray. Anything colorful, he thought, should have been visible for miles. What had not occurred to him was how uncolorful a smuggler could become.

  Had the trooper to Krispos’ left not almost literally stumbled over the man, they never would have spied him. Even then, had he stayed still, he might have escaped notice: he wore white foxskins and, when still, was invisible past twenty paces. But he lost his head and tried to run. He was no better at it on the slippery ice than his pursuers, who soon ran him down.

  Saborios held out a hand to the Khatrisher, who had gone so far as to daub white greasepaint on his beard and face. “You don’t by any chance have your import license along, do you?” the patrol leader asked pleasantly. The Khatrisher stood in glum silence. “No, eh?” Saborios said, almost as if really surprised. “Then let’s have your goods.”

  The smuggler reached under his jacket, drew out a leather pouch.

  The patrol leader opened it. “Amber, is it? Very fine, too. Did you give me all of it? Complete confiscation, you know, is the penalty for unlicensed import.”

  “That’s everything, curse you,” the Khatrisher said sullenly.

  “Good.” Saborios nodded his understanding. “Then you won’t mind Domentzios and Bonosos stripping you. If they find you’ve told the truth, they’ll even give you back your clothes.”

  Krispos was shivering in his furs. He wondered how long a naked man would last on the ice. Not long enough to get off it again, he was sure. He watched the smuggler make the same unhappy calculation. The fellow took a pouch from each boot. The patrol leader pocketed them, then motioned forward the two troopers he had name
d. They were tugging off the Khatrisher’s coat when he exclaimed, “Wait!”

  The imperials looked to the patrol leader, who nodded. The smuggler shed his white fox cap. “I need my knife, all right?” he said. Saborios nodded again. The smuggler cut into the lining, extracted yet another pouch. He threw down the dagger. “Now you can search me.”

  The troopers did. They found nothing. Shivering and swearing, the Khatrisher dove back into his clothes. “You might have got that last one by us,” Saborios remarked.

  “That’s what I thought,” the smuggler said through chattering teeth. “Then I thought I might not have, too.”

  “Sensible,” Saborios said. “Well, let’s take you in. We’ve earned our pay for today, I think.”

  “What will you do with him?” Krispos asked as the patrol turned back toward Opsikion.

  “Hold him for ransom,” Saborios answered. “Nothing else we can do, now that I’ve seen he’s smuggling amber. Gumush will pay to have him back, never fear.” Krispos made a questioning noise. Saborios explained, “Amber’s a royal monopoly in Khatrish. The khagan likes to see if he can avoid paying our tariffs every so often, that’s all. This time he didn’t, so we get some for free.”

  “Does he sneak in enough to make it worth his while?”

  “That’s a sharp question—I thought you were Iakovitzes’ groom, not his bookkeeper. The only answer I know is, he must think so or he wouldn’t keep doing it. But not this run, though.” The patrol leader’s eyes, almost the only part of his face visible, narrowed in satisfaction.

  Iakovitzes howled with glee when Krispos told him the story that evening. They were sitting much closer than usual to Bolkanes’ big fire; Krispos had a mug of hot spiced wine close at hand. He smiled gratefully when one of the barmaids refilled it. Iakovitzes said, “It’ll serve Gumush right. Nothing I enjoy more than a thief having to pay for his own thievery.”

  “Won’t he just raise the price later on to make up for it?” Krispos asked. “The legitimate price, I mean.”

  “Probably, probably,” Iakovitzes admitted. “But what do I care? I don’t much fancy amber. And no matter how hard he squeezes, the world doesn’t hold enough gold for him to buy his way out of embarrassment.” Contemplating someone else’s discomfiture would put Iakovitzes in a good mood if anything would.

  A couple of nights later, Tanilis proved coldly furious that the amber had been seized. “I made the arrangements for it myself with Gumush,” she said. “Four parts in ten off the going rate here, which still allowed him a profit, seeing as the tariff is five parts in ten. He already has half the money, too. Do you suppose he’ll send it back when he ransoms his courier?” Her bitter laugh told how likely that was.

  “But…” Krispos scratched his head. “The Avtokrator needs the money from the tariffs, to pay for soldiers and furs and roads and—”

  “And courtesans and fine wines and fripperies,” Tanilis finished for him; she sounded as scornful of Anthimos III as Pyrrhos had. “But even if it were only as you say, I need money, too, for the good of my own estates. Why should I pay twice as much for amber as I need to for the sake of a handful of rich men in Videssos the city who do nothing for me?”

  “Don’t they?” Krispos asked. “Seems to me I wouldn’t have come here with my master if the men in the city weren’t worried about the border with Khatrish. Or are you such a queen here that your peasants would have fought off the nomad horsemen on their own?” He recalled the Kubratoi descending on his vanished boyhood village as if it had happened only the day before.

  Tanilis frowned. “No, I am no queen, so what you say has some truth. But the Avtokrator and Sevastokrator chose peace with Khatrish for their own reasons, not mine.”

  Remembering Petronas’ ambitions against Makuran, Krispos knew she was right. But he said, “It works out the same for you either way, doesn’t it? If it does, you ought to be willing to pay for it.” He and his fellow villagers had been willing to pay anything within reason to prevent another invasion from Kubrat. Only the Empire’s demands reaching beyond reason had detached him from the land, and the rest of the villagers were there still.

  “You speak well, and to the point,” Tanilis said. “I must confess, my loyalty is to my lands first, and to the Empire of Videssos only after that. What I say is true of most nobles, I think, almost all those away from Videssos the city. To us, the Empire seems more often to check our strength than to protect it, and so we evade demands from the capital as best we can.”

  The more Krispos talked with Tanilis, the more complex his picture of the world grew. Back in his village, he’d thought of nobles as agents of the Empire and thanked Phos that the freeholders among whom he’d lived owed service to no lord. Yet Tanilis seemed no ally to the will of Videssos the city, but rather a rival. But she was no great friend of the peasants, either; she simply wanted to control them herself in place of the central government. Krispos tried to imagine how things looked from Petronas’ perspective. Maybe one day he’d ask the Sevastokrator—after all, he’d met him. He laughed a little, amused at his own presumption.

  “What do you find funny?” Tanilis asked.

  Krispos’ cheeks grew warm. Sometimes when he was with Tanilis, he felt he was a scroll she could unroll and read as she wished. Annoyed at himself for being so open, and sure he could not lie successfully, he explained.

  She took him seriously. She always did; he had to give her that. Though he was certain he often seemed very young and raw to her, she went out of her way not to mock his enthusiasms, even if she let him see she did not share many of them. Even more than the sweet lure of her body, the respect she gave him made him want to spend time with her, in bed and out of it. He wondered if this was how love began.

  The thought so startled him that he missed her reply. She saw that, too, and repeated herself: “If Petronas would tell you, I daresay you’d learn a great deal. A regent who can keep the reins of power even after his ward comes of age—and in such a way that the ward does not hate him—is a man to be reckoned with.”

  “I suppose so.” Krispos knew he sounded abstracted and hoped Tanilis would not figure out why. Loving her could only complicate his life, the more so as he knew she did not love him.

  SLOW AS THE FLOW OF SYRUP ON ICE, NEWS DRIPPED INTO Opsikion through the winter. Krispos heard of the death of khagan Omurtag weeks after it happened; a son named Malomir ascended to the rule of Kubrat. In Thatagush, north and east of Khatrish, a band of Haloga raiders under a chief called Harvas Black-Robe sacked a whole string of towns and smashed the army that tried to drive them away. Some nobles promptly joined forces with the Halogai against their khagan. The King of Kings of Makuran sent a peace embassy to Videssos the city. Petronas sent it back.

  “By the lord with the great and good mind, I gave Petronas what he wanted here,” Iakovitzes said when that report reached him. “Now let’s see what he does with it.” His chuckle had a gloating tone to it. “Not as much as he wants, I’ll wager.”

  “No?” Krispos helped his master out of a chair. The noble could walk with a stick these days, but he still limped badly; his left calf was only half as big around as his right. Krispos went on carefully, “The Sevastokrator strikes me as a man who generally gets what he wants.”

  “Oh, aye, he is. Here, I’m all right now. Thanks.” Iakovitzes hissed as he put weight on his healing leg. Ordanes had given him a set of exercises to strengthen it. He swore through clenched teeth every time he began them, but never missed a day.

  Now he took a couple of steps toward the stairway that led up to his room before he continued. “But what Petronas wants is to overthrow Makuran, and that won’t happen. Stavrakios the Great couldn’t do it, not when the Empire of Videssos ran all the way up to the border of the Haloga country. I suppose the Makurani King of Kings dreams of worshiping their Four Prophets in the High Temple in Videssos the city, and that won’t happen, either. If Petronas can bite off a chunk of Vaspurakan, he’ll have done something worthw
hile, at any rate. We can use the metals there and the men, even if they are heretics.”

  A guardsman coming off duty threw open the door to Bolkanes’ taproom. Though he slammed it again right away, Krispos and Iakovitzes both shivered at the icy blast he let in. He stood in the front hall brushing snow off his clothes and out of his beard.

  “Beastly weather,” Iakovitzes said. “I could ride now, but what’s the point? The odds are too good I’d end up a block of ice somewhere halfway between here and the city, and that would be a piteous waste. Come to think of it, you’d freeze, too.”

  “Thank you for thinking of me,” Krispos said mildly.

  Iakovitzes cocked an eyebrow. “You’re getting better at that innocent-sounding comeback, aren’t you? Do you practice in front of a mirror?”

  “Er—no.” Krispos knew his fencing with Tanilis helped sharpen both his wits and his wit. He hadn’t realized anyone else would notice.

  “Maybe it’s the time you spend knocking around with Mavros,” Iakovitzes said. Krispos blinked; his master’s guess was good enough to startle him. Iakovitzes went on, “He has a noble’s air to him, even if he is young.”

  “I hadn’t really noticed,” Krispos said. “I suppose he gets it from his mother.”

  “Maybe.” As he did whenever a woman was mentioned, Iakovitzes sounded indifferent. He reached the stairway. “Give me your hand, will you, for the way up?” Krispos complied. Chill or no, Iakovitzes was sweating by the time he got to the top of the stairs; his leg still did not take kindly to such work.

  Krispos went through the usual small wrestling match he needed to get the noble to let go. “After a year with me, excellent sir, don’t you believe I’m not interested?” he asked.

  “Oh, I believe it,” Iakovitzes said. “I just don’t take it seriously.” Having had, if not Krispos, then at least the last word, he hobbled down the hall toward his room.

  RAIN PATTERED ON THE SHUTTERS OF THE BEDROOM WINDOW. “The second storm in a row with no snow in it,” Tanilis said. “No sleet in this one either, or none to speak of. Winter is finally losing its grip.”