The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  “Stick him by a river, he’ll cut down trees like a beaver,” a Haloga said. Everyone laughed except Barsymes, who let out an indignant sniff.

  Krispos watched Phostis playing in the sunshine. He suddenly bent down to run a hand through the little boy’s thick black hair. He saw Dara’s eyes widen with surprise; he seldom showed Phostis physical affection. But he knew beyond any possible doubt that, even if Phostis happened to be Anthimos’ son rather than his own, he would far, far sooner, see him ruling the Empire of Videssos than Harvas Black-Robe.

  Chapter IX

  THE IMPERIAL ARMY WAS LIKE A CITY ON THE MARCH. AS FAR as Krispos could see in any direction were horses and helmets and spearpoints and wagons. They overflowed the road and moved northward on either side. Yet even in the midst of so many armed men, Krispos did not feel altogether secure. He had gone north with an army before and come back defeated.

  “What are our chances, Trokoundos?” he asked, anxious to be reassured.

  The wizard’s lips twitched; Krispos had asked the same question less than an hour before. As he had before, Trokoundos answered: “Were no magic to be used by either side, Majesty. I could hope to ascertain that for you. As it is, spells yet to be cast befog any magic I might use. I assure you, though, Harvas enters this campaign as blind as we do.”

  Krispos wondered how true that was. Harvas might have no sorcerous foretelling, but he’d lived as long as five or six ordinary men. On how much of that vast experience could he draw, to scent what his foes would do next?

  “Will we have enough mages to hold him in check?”

  “There, Your Majesty, I can be less certain,” Trokoundos said. “By the lord with the great and good mind, though, we now have a better notion of how to try to cope with him, thanks to the researches of Gnatios.”

  “Thanks to Gnatios,” Krispos repeated, not altogether happily. Now instead of a patriarch who backed him absolutely but thought nothing of setting the whole Empire ablaze for the sake of perfect orthodoxy, he had once more a patriarch who was theologically moderate but not to be trusted out of sight—or in it, for that matter. He hoped the trade would prove worthwhile.

  Trokoundos continued, “When I faced Harvas last year, I took him for a barbarian wizard, puissant but—why are you laughing, Your Majesty?”

  “Never mind,” Krispos said, laughing still. “Go on, please.”

  “Ahem. Well, as I say, I reckoned Harvas Black-Robe to be powerful but unschooled. Now I know this is not the case—just the reverse obtains, in fact. Having now, thanks to Gnatios, a better notion of the sort of magic he employs, and having also with me more—and more potent—colleagues, I do possess some hope that we shall be able to defend against his onslaughts.”

  All the finest mages of the Sorcerers’ Collegium rode with the army. If Trokoundos could but hope to withstand Harvas by their combined efforts, that in itself spoke volumes about the evil wizard’s strength. They were not volumes Krispos cared to read. He said, “Can we sorcerously strike back at the northerners who follow Harvas?”

  “Your Majesty, we will try,” Trokoundos said. “The good god willing, we will distract Harvas from the magics he might otherwise hurl at us. Past that, I have no great hope. Because battle so inflames men’s passions, magic more readily slips aside from them then and is more easily countered. That is why battle magic succeeds so seldom…save Harvas’.” Krispos wished the wizard had not tacked on that codicil.

  Rhisoulphos rode by at a fast trot. “Why aren’t you with your regiment?” Krispos called.

  His father-in-law reined in and looked around, as if wondering who presumed to address him with such familiarity. His face cleared when he saw Krispos. “Greetings, Your Majesty,” he said, saluting. “I just gave a courier a note to a friend in the city, and now I am indeed returning to my men. By your leave…” He waited for Krispos’ nod, then dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and urged the animal on again.

  Krispos followed him with his eyes. Rhisoulphos did not look back. He rode as if in a competition of horsemanship, without a single wasted motion. “He’s so smooth,” Krispos said, as much to himself as to Trokoundos. “He rides smoothly, he talks smoothly, he has smooth good looks and smooth good sense.”

  “But you don’t like him,” Trokoundos said. It was not a question.

  “No, I don’t. I want to. I ought to. He’s Dara’s father, after all. But with so much smoothness on the top of him, who can be sure what’s underneath? Petronas guessed wrong and paid for it, too.”

  “Set next to Harvas—”

  “Every other worry is a small one. I know. But I have to keep an eye on the small things, too, for fear they’ll grow while my back was turned. I wonder who he was writing to. You know, Trokoundos, what I really need is a spell that would give me eyes all around my head and let me stay awake day and night both. Then I’d sleep better—except I wouldn’t sleep, would I?” Krispos stopped. “I’ve confused myself.”

  Trokoundos smiled. “Never mind, Your Majesty. No wizard can give you what you asked for, so there’s no point in fretting over it.”

  “I suppose not. Fretting over Rhisoulphos, though, is something else again.” Krispos looked ahead once more, but the general had vanished—smoothly—among the swarms of riders heading north.

  The army did not cover much more ground in a day than a walking man might have. When the troopers moved, they set a decent pace. But getting them moving each morning and getting them into camp every night ate away at the time they were able to spend on the road. That had also been true of the forces Krispos led against Petronas and against Harvas the summer before, but to a lesser degree. One of the things a huge army meant was huge inefficiency.

  “That’s just the way it goes,” Mammianos said when Krispos complained. “We can’t move out in the morning till the slowest soldiers are ready to go. If we let quicker regiments just rush on ahead, after a few days we’d have men strung out over fifty miles. The whole point of a big army is to be able to use all the troops you’ve brought along.”

  “Supplies—” Krispos said, as if it were a complete sentence.

  Mammianos clapped him on the shoulder. “Majesty, unless we crawl north on our hands and knees, we’ll manage. The quartermasters know how fast—how slow, if you like—we travel. They’ve had practice keeping armies this size in bread, I promise you.”

  Krispos let himself be reassured. The Videssian bureaucracy had kept the Empire running throughout Anthimos’ antic reign and through worse reigns than his in the past. Avtokrators came, ruled, and were gone; the gray, efficient stewards, secretaries, and logothetes went on forever. The army quartermasters belonged to the same breed.

  He wondered what would happen if one day an Emperor died and no one succeeded him. He suspected the bureaucrats would go on ruling competently if unspectacularly…at least until some important paper needed signing. Then, for want of a signature, the whole state would come crashing down. He chuckled softly, pleased at his foolish conceit.

  The next day the army rode past the field when Harvas’ raiders had beaten and killed Mavros. The mass graves Krispos’ men had dug afterward still scarred the earth. Now new grass, green and hopeful, was spreading over the squares of raw dirt. Krispos pointed to it. “Like the grass, may our victory spring from their defeat.”

  “From your lips to the ear of Phos,” Trokoundos said, sketching the sun-sign with his right hand. He sent Krispos a sly look. “I hadn’t thought Your Majesty had so much of a poet in him.”

  “Poet?” Krispos snorted. “I’m no poet, just a farmer—well, a man who used to be a farmer. The grass will grow tall over those graves, with the bodies of so many brave men manuring the fields.”

  The mage nodded soberly. “That’s a less pleasing image, but I daresay a truer one.”

  They camped three or four miles past the battlefield, far enough, Krispos hoped, to keep the troopers from brooding on it. As was his habit each evening, Krispos wrote a brief note to Iakovitzes det
ailing the day’s progress. When he was done, he called for a courier.

  A rider came trotting up to the imperial tent hardly a minute later. He saluted Krispos and said, “All right, Your Majesty, let’s have yours, too, and I’ll be off for the city.”

  He sat his horse with a let’s-get-on-with-it, don’t-waste-my-time attitude that made Krispos smile. That attitude and the blithe cheek of his words left Krispos certain he was a city man himself. “Mine, too, is it, eh? Well, sir, with whose letter is mine lucky enough to travel?”

  “It’s all in the family, you might say, Your Majesty: yours and your father-in-law’s will go together, both in the same pouch.”

  “Will they?” Krispos raised an eyebrow. He knew his use of the gesture did not have the flair that Chihor-Vshnasp, say, put into it, but it got the job done. “And to whom is the eminent Rhisoulphos writing?”

  “Just let me look and I’ll tell you.” Like any man from Videssos the city, the courier took it for granted that he knew things lesser mortals didn’t. He opened his leather dispatch pouch and drew out a roll of parchment sealed with enough wax to keep a poor family in candles for a month. He had to turn it between his fingers to find out where the address was. “Here we go, Your Majesty. It’s to the most holy patriarch Gnatios, it is. Least-ways, I think he’s most holy patriarch this week, unless you made him into a monk again while I wasn’t looking, or maybe into a prawn salad.”

  “A prawn salad? He’ll end up wishing he was a prawn salad when I get through with him.” Maybe Rhisoulphos was writing to Gnatios for enlightenment on an abstruse theological point or for some other innocuous reason. Krispos didn’t believe it, not for a minute. The two of them were both intriguers, and he the logical person against whom they would intrigue. He plucked at his beard as he thought, then turned to one of the Halogai who stood guard in front of his tent. “Vagn, fetch me Trokoundos, right away.”

  “The mage, Majesty? Aye, I bring him.”

  Trokoundos was picking at his teeth with a fingernail as he followed Vagn to the imperial tent. “What’s toward, Your Majesty?”

  “This fellow”—Krispos pointed to the courier—“is carrying a letter from the excellent Rhisoulphos to the most holy patriarch Gnatios.”

  “Is he indeed?” No one had to draw pictures for Trokoundos. “Are you curious about what’s in that letter?”

  “You might say so, yes.” Krispos held out a hand. The courier was not a man to be caught napping. With a flourish, he gave Krispos Rhisoulphos’ letter. Krispos passed it to Trokoundos. “As you see, it’s sealed tighter than a winter grain pit. Can you get it open and then shut again without breaking the seals?”

  “Hmm. An interesting question. Do you know, sometimes these small conjurations are harder than the more grandiose ones? I’m certain I can get the wax off and on again, but the first method that springs to mind would surely ruin the writing it shelters—not what you have in mind, unless I miss my guess. Let me think…”

  He proceeded to do just that, quite intensely, for the next couple of minutes. Once he brightened, then shook his head and sank back into his study. At last he nodded.

  “You can do it, then?” Krispos said.

  “I believe so, Your Majesty. Not a major magic, but one that will draw upon the laws of similarity and contagion both, and nearly at the same time. I presume privacy would be a valuable adjunct to this undertaking?”

  “What? Oh, yes; of course.” Krispos held the tent flap open with his own hands, then followed Trokoundos inside.

  The wizard said, “You must have some parchment in here, yes?” Laughing, Krispos pointed to the portable desk where he’d just finished his note to Iakovitzes. Several other sheets still curled over one another. Trokoundos nodded. “Excellent.” He took one, rolling it into a cylinder of about the same diameter as the sealed letter from Rhisoulphos to Gnatios. Then he touched the two of them together and squinted at the place where their ends joined. “I’ll use the law of similarity in two aspects,” he explained. “First in that parchment is similar to parchment, and second in that these are two similar cylinders. Now just a dab of paste to let this one hold its shape—can’t use ribbon, don’t you know, for it wouldn’t be in precisely the right place.”

  Krispos didn’t know, but he’d already seen that Trokoundos liked to lecture as he worked. The mage set his new parchment cylinder upright on the desk. “By the law of contagion, things once in contact continue to influence each other after that contact ends. Thus—” He held the letter upright in one hand and made slow passes over it with the other, chanting all the while.

  Sudden as a blink, the sealing wax disappeared. Trokoundos pointed to the parchment cylinder he’d made. “You did it!” Krispos exclaimed—that new cylinder wore a wax coat now. Every daub and spatter that had been on the letter was there.

  “So I did,” Trokoundos said with a touch of smugness. “I had to make certain my cylinder was no wider than the one Rhisoulphos made of his letter. That was most important, for otherwise the wax would have cracked as it tried to form itself around my piece of parchment.”

  He went on explaining, but Krispos had stopped listening. He held out his hand for the letter. Trokoundos gave it to him. He slid off the ribbon, unrolled the document, and read: “‘Rhisoulphos to the most holy ecumenical patriarch Gnatios: Greetings. As I said in my last letter, I think it self-evident that Videssos would best be ruled by a man whose blood is of the best, not by a parvenu, no matter how energetic.’” He paused. “What’s a parvenu?”

  “Somebody able who just came off a farm himself, instead of having a great-great-grandfather who did it for him,” Trokoundos said.

  “Oh.” Krispos resumed: “‘As you are scion of a noble house yourself, most holy sir, I am confident you will agree with me and will seize the opportunity to expound this position to the people when the proper circumstances arise. What with the uncertainty and danger of the campaign upon which Krispos has embarked, that moment may come at any time.’” He stopped again.

  Trokoundos said, “Nothing treasonous so far—quite. He could as well be worrying about what happens if you die in battle as over anything else.”

  “So he could. But he sends himself to the ice with his next five words. Listen: “‘It might even be hastened.’”

  “Aye, that’s treason,” Trokoundos said flatly. “What will you do about it?”

  Krispos had been thinking about that from the instant he’d learned Rhisoulphos was corresponding with Gnatios. Now he answered, “First, I want you to seal the letter up again.” He handed it to Trokoundos.

  “Of course, Your Majesty.” Trokoundos rerolled the letter and put the ribbon around it once more. His left hand shaped a quick pass; he spoke a low-voiced word of command. The ribbon changed place on the parchment. “I’ve returned it to its exact previous position, Your Majesty, so the restored wax will fit over it perfectly.”

  Without waiting for Krispos’ nod, the mage held the letter upright. The ribbon did not stir; evidently the minor magic held it where it belonged. Trokoundos began the chant he had used before to remove the sealing wax. This time, though, his fingers fluttered downward in his passes rather than up toward the ceiling of the imperial tent.

  Again Krispos missed the transfer of wax from one parchment to the other. One instant it was on the roll that stood on his desk; the next, back on Rhisoulphos’ letter. With a bow Trokoundos returned the letter to Krispos.

  “Thanks.” Krispos went back outside. The courier was waiting with no sign of impatience; the sorcery could not have taken long. Krispos gave him the letter. “Everything’s fine,” he said, smiling. “Go on and deliver this to the patriarch; he’ll be glad to have it.”

  The courier saluted. “Just as you say, Your Majesty.” He clucked to his horse and dug in his heels. With a small snort, the animal trotted away.

  Krispos turned to Vagn. “Can you find me, hmm, half a dozen of your countrymen? I need quiet men, men who can not only keep their mouths
shut but also move quietly.”

  “I bring them, Majesty,” Vagn said at once.

  Trokoundos sent Krispos a curious look. He ignored it. A few minutes later Vagn returned with six more burly blond northerners. For all their bulk, they moved like hunting cats. Krispos held the tent flap open. “Brave sirs, come in. I have a task for you—”

  KRISPOS WOKE AT SUNRISE EVERY DAY. MAYBE I’D BE ABLE TO sleep late if my great-great-grandfather were the one who’d come off the farm, he thought as he put his feet on the ground. He listened to the camp stirring to life.

  He was just buckling on his sword belt when shouts of alarm cut through the usual morning drone of chattering men, clanking mail, and bubbling cookpots. He stuck his head outside, savoring a long breath of cool, fresh air; soon enough the day would turn hot and sticky. “What’s going on?” he asked Narvikka, who was standing morning guard duty.

  “Majesty, the noble Rhisoulphos seems to have disappeared,” the Haloga answered.

  “Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “He is not in his tent, Majesty, not anywhere about the camp,” Narvikka said stolidly.

  “That’s terrible news. What could have happened to him?” Since Narvikka only shrugged a musical chain mail shrug, Krispos hurried over to Rhisoulphos’ tent, which lay not far away. The tent was surrounded by men and officers, all of them agitated. Krispos strode up to Rhisoulphos’ second-in-command. “What’s happened, excellent Bagradas?”

  “Your Majesty!” Bagradas saluted. He was a short, pudgy man of about forty who looked and often acted more like a dressmaker than a soldier. Krispos knew he was one of the two or three best swordsmen in the imperial army. That did not keep him from wringing his hands now. “Your wife the lady Empress’ father has been stolen away from us, whether by wicked men or dark sorcery I cannot say.”