The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  No cunningly hidden sorcerous pit yawned in the roadway. No hordes of Halogai charged roaring from the shelter of brush or trees. The only damage was to the fields the army trampled as it moved ahead in line of battle. Looking off to left and right, Krispos saw ruined villages and suspected few farmers were left to work those fields in any case.

  A gray smudge on the northern horizon, light against the green woods and purple mountains behind it: Imbros’ wall. Now it was Krispos’ turn to yowl. He turned to Mammianos and showed his teeth like a wolf. “We’re here, excellent sir, in spite of all our worries.”

  “By the good god, so we are.” Mammianos glanced first to Krispos, then to the musicians. Krispos nodded. “At the trot, gentlemen,” Mammianos said. The musicians passed along the command. The soldiers cheered.

  Imbros drew nearer. Krispos saw in the distance the people outside the walls that his scouts had reported. His wolf’s grin grew wider…but then slipped from his face. Why did Harvas’ men simply hold their position? If he saw them, surely they had seen him. But no one around the walls moved, nor did anyone seem to be on those walls.

  Up ahead with the scouts, Trokoundos suddenly wheeled his horse and galloped back toward Krispos. He was shouting something. Over the noise any moving army makes, Krispos needed a few seconds to hear what it was. “Dead! They’re all dead!”

  “Who? Who’s dead?” troopers yelled at the wizard. Krispos echoed them. For a heady moment, he imagined disease had struck down Harvas’ host where they stood. They deserved nothing better, he thought with somber glee.

  But Trokoundos answered, “The folk of Imbros, all piteously slain.” He reined in, leaned down onto his horse’s neck, and wept without shame or restraint.

  Krispos spurred his horse forward. After Trokoundos’ warning, after the way the wizard, usually so self-controlled, had broken down, he thought he was braced for the worst. He needed only moments to discover how little he had imagined what the worst might be. The people of Imbros were not merely slain. They had been impaled, thousands of them—men, women, and children—each on his own separate stake. The stakes were uniformly black all the way to the ground with old dried blood.

  The soldiers who advanced with Krispos stared in disbelieving horror at the spectacle Harvas had left behind for them. They were no strangers to dealing out death; some of them, perhaps, were no strangers to massacre, on the sordid but human scale of the butchered prisoners farther south. But at Imbros the size of the massacre was enough to daunt even a monster of a man.

  Sarkis swatted at the flies that rose in buzzing clouds from the swollen, stinking corpses. “Well, Your Majesty, now we know why no fugitives came south from Imbros to warn us of its fall,” he said. “No one was able to flee.”

  “This can’t be everyone who lived in Imbros,” Krispos protested. He knew his heart was speaking, not his mind; he could see how many people squatted on their stakes in a ghastly parody of alertness.

  In a way, though, he was proven right. As the army made its way through the neat concentric rows of bodies to Imbros’ wall, the men soon discovered how Harvas’ warriors had entered the city: the northern quadrant of those walls was cast down in ruins, down to the very ground.

  “Like Develtos,” Trokoundos said. His eyes were red; tears still tracked his cheeks. He held his voice steady by force of will, like a man controlling a restive horse. “Like Develtos, save that they must have been hurried there. Here they had the time to do their proper job.”

  When Krispos entered Imbros, he found what had befallen the rest of the folk who had dwelt there. They lay dead in the streets; the town had been burned over their heads after they fell.

  “Mostly men in here, I’d say,” Mammianos observed. “And look—here’s a mail shirt that missed getting stolen. These must have been the ones who tried to fight back. Once they were gone, looks like Harvas had his filthy fun with everyone else.”

  “Aye,” Krispos said. Calmly discussing the hows and whys of wholesale slaughter as he went through its aftermath struck him as grotesque. But if he was to understand—as well as an ordinary man could ever grasp such destruction—what else were he and his followers to do?

  He walked the dead streets of the murdered city, Trokoundos at his side and a troop of Halogai all around him to protect against anything that might lurk there yet. The northerners peered every which way, their pale eyes wide. They muttered to themselves in their own tongue.

  At last Narvikka asked, “Majesty, why all this—this making into nothing? To sack a town, to despoil a town, is all very well, but for what purpose did our cousins slay this town and then cast the corpse onto the fire?”

  “I’d hoped you could tell me,” Krispos said. The guardsman, as was the Haloga way, had stripped the problem to its core. War for loot, war for belief, war for territory made sense to Krispos. But what reason could lie behind war for the sake of utter devastation?

  Narvikka made a sign with his fingers—had he been a Videssian, Krispos guessed he would have drawn the sun-circle over his heart. That guard said, “Majesty, I cannot fathom the minds of the men who fought here. That they are of my folk raises only shame in me. Renegades and outlawed men would not act so, much less warriors from honest holdings.” Other northerners nodded.

  “But they did act so,” Krispos said. Every time he breathed, he took in the miasma of dead flesh and old smoke. He let his feet lead him through Imbros; even after so many years away, they seemed to remember how the bigger streets ran. Before long, he found himself in the central market square, looking across it toward the temple.

  Once he’d thought that temple the grandest building he’d ever seen. Now he knew it was but a provincial imitation of Phos’ High Temple in Videssos the city, and not a particularly impressive one, either. But even fire-ravaged as it was now, it still raised memories in him, memories of awe and faith and belief.

  Those memories clashed terribly with the row of impaled bodies in front of the temple, the first he’d seen inside Imbros who had received that treatment rather than the quicker, cleaner death of axe or sword or fire. What with the stains of blood and smoke, he needed a moment to realize those victims all wore the blue robe. He sketched the sun-sign.

  So did Trokoundos beside him. “Did I not hear they were savage to priests in Develtos, as well?” the wizard asked quietly.

  “Aye, so they were.” Krispos’ boots clicked on flagstones as he walked across the square toward the temple. He stepped around a couple of corpses of the ordinary, crumpled sort. By now, numb with the scale of the butchery here, he found them hardly more than obstacles in his path.

  But what the priests had suffered penetrated even that numbness. Though some days dead, their bodies still gave mute testimony to those special torments. As if impalement were insufficient anguish, some had had their manhood cut away, other their guts stretched along the ground for the carrion birds, still others their beards—and their faces—burned away.

  Krispos turned his back on them, then made himself look their way once more. “May Phos take their souls into the light.”

  “So may it be,” Trokoundos said. “But Skotos seems to have had his way with their bodies.” Together, he and Krispos spat.

  Krispos said, “All this ground will have to be blessed before we can rebuild. Who would want to live here otherwise, after this?” He nodded to himself. “I’ll suspend taxes for the new folk I move in, and keep them off for a while, to try another way to make people want to stay once they’ve come.”

  “Spoken like an Emperor,” Trokoundos said.

  “Spoken like a man who wants Imbros to be a living city again soon,” Krispos said impatiently. “It’s a bulwark against whoever raids down from Kubrat, and in peacetime it’s the main market town for the land near the mountains.”

  “And now, Majesty?” Trokoudnos said. “Will you pause to bury the dead here?”

  “No,” Krispos said, impatient still. “I want to come to grips with Harvas as soon as I can.” H
e glanced toward the sun, which stood low in the west—days were shorter now than they had been while he laid siege to Petronas. Again he cursed the time he’d had to spend in civil war. “There’s not a lot of summer left to waste.”

  “No denying that, Your Majesty,” Trokoundos said. “But—” He let the word hang.

  Krispos had no trouble finishing for him. “But Harvas knows that, too. Aye, I’m all too sure he does. I’m all too sure he has some deviltry brewing, too, just waiting for us. I trust my soldiers to match his. As for magic—how strong can Harvas be?”

  Trokoundos’ lips twisted in a grin that seemed gayer than it was. “I expect, Your Majesty, that before too long I shall find out.”

  MORE EAGER FOR FIGHTING THAN ANY ARMY KRISPOS HAD known, his force stormed north up the highway after Harvas’ raiders. “Imbros!” was their cry; the name of the murdered city was never far from their lips.

  The Paristrian Mountains towered against the northern horizon now, the highest peaks still snow-covered even in later summer. Some of the men from the western lowlands exclaimed at them. To Krispos they were—not old friends, for he remembered the kind of weather that blew over them through half the year, but a presence to which he was accustomed all the same.

  Everything hereabouts seemed familiar, from the quality of the light, paler and grayer than it was in Videssos the city, to the fields of ripening wheat and barley and oats—worked now only by the few farmers lucky enough to have escaped Harvas’ men—to the way little tracks ran off the highway, now to the east, now to the west.

  Krispos pulled Progress out of the line of march when he came to one of those roads. He stared west along it for a long time, his mind ranging farther than his eyes could reach.

  “What is it, Majesty?” Geirrod asked at last. He had to speak twice before Krispos heard him.

  “My village lies down this road,” Krispos answered. “Or rather it did; Harvas’ bandits went through here last year.” He shook his head. “When I left, I hoped I’d come back with money in my belt pouch. I never dreamed it would be as Avtokrator—or that the people I grew up with wouldn’t be here to greet me.”

  “The world is as it is, Majesty, not always as we dream it will be.”

  “Too true. Well, enough time wasted here.” Krispos tapped Progress’ flanks with his heels. The big bay gelding walked, then went into a trot that soon brought Krispos back to his proper place in the column.

  The road ran straight up toward the gap in the mountains, past empty fields, past stands of oak and maple and pine, past a small chuckling stream, and, as the ground grew higher, past more and more outcroppings of cold gray stone. Though Krispos had not seen it since he was perhaps nine years old, the gray landscape seemed eerily familiar. He and his parents and sisters had come down this road after Iakovitzes ransomed them and hundreds of other Videssian peasants from captivity in Kubrat. He must have been keyed up almost to fever pitch then, for fear the Kubratoi would change their minds and swoop down again, for everything on that journey remained as vivid in his mind as if he’d lived it yesterday. The way water splashed from that clump of rocks in the stream had not changed at all in the two decades since, save that frogs had perched on them then.

  The mountains themselves…I’ve always been happier to see them getting smaller, Krispos thought. They were not getting smaller now, worse luck. Krispos peered up and ahead. Now he could see the opening of the pass that led to Kubrat. Agapetos got through with less force than I have, he thought. I will, too.

  When he said that aloud, Mammianos grunted. “Aye, Agapatos got through, but he couldn’t maintain himself north of the mountains. And Harvas beat him again on this side, then came down first on Imbros and then onto Mavros’ army. Strikes me he’s been able to defeat us in detail, if you know what I mean.”

  “Are you telling me I shouldn’t attack?” Krispos asked, scowling. “After all he’s done to us, how can I halt now?”

  The image of thousands of bodies, each gruesomely buggered by its own stake, shoved itself forward in his mind. With it came a new vision, that of hundreds of men matter-of-factly cutting and sharpening those stakes. How could they have kept to their work, knowing what the stakes would be used for? Even Kubratoi would have gagged on such cruelty, he thought. And Halogai, judging by long experience with the imperial guards, were harsh but rarely vicious. What made Harvas’ men so different?

  Mammianos’ reply brought him back to the here and now. “All I’m saying, Your Majesty, is that Harvas strikes me as dangerous enough to need hitting with everything the Empire has. The more I see, the more I think that. What we have with us is strong, aye, but is it strong enough?”

  “By the good god, Mammianos, I aim to find out,” Krispos said. Mammianos bowed his head in submission. He could suggest, but when the Avtokrator decided, his lot was to obey. Or to mutiny, Krispos thought. But Mammianos had seen plenty of better chances than this for mutiny. His disagreement with Krispos lay in how best to hurt Harvas, not whether to.

  The army camped just out of bowshot of the foothills that night. Peering north in the darkness, Krispos saw the slopes of the mountains ahead dimly illuminated by orange, flickering light. He summoned Mammianos and pointed. “Does that mean what I think?”

  “Bide a moment, Majesty, while the campfire glare leaves my eyes.” Like Krispos, Mammianos stood with his back to the imperial camp. At last he said, “Aye, it does. They’re encamped there, waiting for us.”

  “Forcing the pass won’t be easy,” Krispos said.

  “No, it won’t,” the general agreed. “All kinds of things can go wrong when you try to barge through a defended pass. A holding force at the narrowest part will plug it up while they roll rocks down from either side, or maybe come charging down from ambush—that’d be easy for Harvas’ buggers, because they’re foot soldiers.”

  “Perhaps I should have listened to you before,” Krispos said.

  “Aye, Majesty, perhaps you should,” Mammianos said—as close to criticism of the Emperor as he would let himself come.

  Krispos plucked at his beard. He could not pull back, not having come so far, not having seen Imbros, not unless he wanted to forfeit the army’s faith in him forevermore. Going blindly forward, though, was a recipe for disaster. If he had some idea of what lay ahead…He whistled to one of his guardsmen. “Fetch me Trokoundos,” he said.

  The wizard was yawning when he arrived, but cast off sleepiness like an old tunic when Krispos explained what he wanted. He nodded thoughtfully. “I know a scrying spell that should serve, Your Majesty, one subtle enough that no barbarian mage, no mage not formally trained, should even be able to detect it, let alone counteract it. Against Petronas it would not have sufficed, for Skeparnas was my match, near enough. But against Harvas it should do very well; however strong in magic he may be, he is bound to be unschooled. If you will excuse me—”

  When Trokoundos returned, he held in his hand a bronze bracelet. “Haloga workmanship,” he explained as he showed it to Krispos. “I found it outside of Imbros; I think we may take it as proven that one of Harvas’ raiders lost it. By the law of contagion, it is still bonded to its onetime owner, a bond we may now use to our advantage.”

  “Spare the lecture, sir mage,” Mammianos said. “So long as you learn what we need to know, I care not how you do it.”

  “Very well,” Trokoundos said stiffly. He held the bracelet out at arm’s length toward the north, then started a slow, soft chant. The chant went on and on. Krispos was beginning to get both worried and annoyed when Trokoundos finally lowered the bracelet. As he turned, the campfire shadowed the lines of puzzlement on his face. “Let me try again, with a variant of the spell. Perhaps the owner of the bracelet was slain; nonetheless, it remains affiliated, albeit more loosely, with the army as a whole.”

  He began to chant once more. Krispos could not tell any difference between this version of the spell and the other, but was willing to believe it was there. But he found no difference in the r
esult: after some time, Trokoundos halted in baffled frustration.

  “Majesty,” he said, “so far as I can tell by my sorcery, there’s no one at all up ahead.”

  “What? That’s absurd,” Krispos said. “We can see the fires—”

  “They could be a bluff, Your Majesty,” Mammianos put in.

  “You don’t believe that,” Krispos said.

  “No, Your Majesty, I don’t, but it could be so. I tell you what, though: I’ll send out a couple of scouts. They’ll come back with what we need to know.”

  “Good. Do it,” Krispos said.

  “Aye, do it,” Trokoundos agreed. “By the good god, excellent sir, I hope it is a bluff ahead, as you say. The alternative is believing that Harvas has a renegade Videssian mage in his service, and after Imbros I would sooner not believe that.” The wizard made a sour face, decisively shook his head. “No, it can’t be. I’d have sensed that my spell was being masked. I didn’t have that feeling, only the emptiness I’d get if there truly were no men ahead.”

  The scouts slipped out of camp. They looked to be ideal soldiers for their task; had Krispos met them on the streets of Videssos the city, he would have unhesitatingly guessed they were thieves. Small, lithe, and wary, they carried only daggers and vanished into the night without a sound.

  Yawning, Krispos said, “Wake me as soon as they get back.” Worn though he was, he did not sleep well. Thoughts of Imbros would not leave his mind or, worse, his dreams. He was relieved when a guardsman came in to rouse him and tell him the scouts had returned.

  A thin crescent moon had risen in the east; dawn was not far away. The scouts—there were three of them—prostrated themselves before him. “Get up, get up,” he said impatiently. “What did you see?”

  “A whole great lot of Halogai, Your Majesty,” one of them answered in a flat, upcountry accent like the one Krispos had had before he came to Videssos the city. The other two scouts nodded to confirm his words. He went on, “And you know how the pass jogs westward so you can’t see all the way up it from here? Just past the jog, they’ve gone and built themselves a breastwork. Be nasty getting past there, Your Majesty.”