The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  Before he could say as much, a familiar figure from Livanios’ miniature court at the keep came stamping up the street: the fellow who seemed to be the heresiarch’s chief wizard. Despite all his time in Etchmiadzin, Phostis still had not learned the man’s name. Now he wore a thick wool caftan with bright vertical stripes, and on his head a fur cap with earflaps that might have come straight off the plains of Pardraya.

  He touched his forehead, lips, and chest in greeting to Olyvria, gave Phostis a measuring stare, and ignored Syagrios. “He’s going into Strabon’s house,” Phostis said. “What does he want with someone who likely won’t be here two weeks from now and may not be here tomorrow?”

  “He visits everyone he can who chooses to leave the world of evil things,” Olyvria answered. “I don’t know why; if he’s as curious as most mages, perhaps he seeks to learn as much as he can about the world to come while still remaining in this one.”

  “Maybe.” Phostis supposed one did not cease to be a mage, or a tanner, or a tailor, on becoming a Thanasiot. “What is he called, anyhow?”

  Olyvria paused visibly before she answered. Syagrios stepped into the breach: “He doesn’t like people knowin’ his name, for fear they’ll work magic with it.”

  “That’s silly. He must not be much of a wizard, then,” Phostis said. “My father’s chief mage is named Zaidas, and he doesn’t care who knows it. He says if you can’t protect yourself from name magic, you have no business taking up sorcery in the first place.”

  “Not all wizards have the same ways,” Olyvria said. Since that was too obviously true to require comment, Phostis let it go.

  The fellow in the caftan came out of Strabon’s house a couple of minutes later. He did not look happy, and was muttering under his breath. Not all the muttering sounded like Videssian; Phostis wondered if he was from nearby Vaspurakan. Of what was in the imperial language, Phostis caught only one phrase: “Old bastard’s not ripe yet.” The wizard stalked away.

  “Not ripe yet?” Phostis said after he’d rounded a corner. “Not ripe for what?”

  “I don’t know,” Syagrios said. “Me, I don’t mess with mages or their business and I don’t want them messin’ with me.”

  That was a sensible attitude for anyone, and especially, Phostis thought, for somebody like Syagrios, who was likely to be “messed with” by mages when said mages were on the track of objects mysteriously vanished. Phostis smiled at his automatic contempt for the bruiser who’d become his keeper. Syagrios saw the smile and gave him a hard, suspicious stare. He did his best to look innocent, which was rendered more difficult because he was guilty.

  Syagrios changed the subject. “How’s about we go find some food? Standin’ on my pins all mornin’, me, I could hack steaks off a donkey and eat ’em raw.”

  “Get out of here, you beast! Out of my sight!” Olyvria snarled, her voice breaking with fury. “Out! Away! How dare you—how could you be so dense, so blockheaded—as to talk about food after we’ve just seen the pious Strabon dedicating himself to escaping the world and advancing along the gleaming path? Get out!”

  “No,” Syagrios said. “Your father told me to keep an eye on this one”—he pointed at Phostis—“and that there’s just what I aim to do.”

  Up till then, that stolid remark had been proof against anything Olyvria would throw at it. Indeed, Olyvria had not tried to contest it. Now, though, she said, “Where will he go? Do you think he’ll kidnap me?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Syagrios answered. “I just know what I got told to do.”

  “Well, I tell you to go away. I can’t abide the sight or sound of you after what you just said,” Olyvria said. When he shook his head, she added, “If you don’t, I’ll tell my father what you said just now. Do you want to undergo the penance you’d receive for mocking the holy faith?”

  “I don’t,” Syagrios said, but he seemed suddenly doubtful. Whether he had or he hadn’t, Livanios was apt to believe Olyvria rather than him. It was most unfair. All at once, Phostis understood why he himself had not had many friends as a boy. If he ran to tell his father about a quarrel, his father was the Avtokrator. If the Avtokrator—or Livanios now—ruled against you, to whom could you appeal?

  Bitterness gusted through Phostis. The Avtokrator, in those lost boyhood days, was only too likely to rule against him, not for. His father had never truly warmed to him; from time to time he wondered what he’d done wrong, to make Krispos find fault with everything about him. He doubted he’d ever find out.

  Olyvria said to Syagrios, “Go on, I tell you. I’ll be responsible for seeing Phostis doesn’t run out of Etchmiadzin. And I tell you this, too: if you say me nay once more, you’ll be sorry for it.”

  “All right, then, my lady.” The ruffian turned what should have been a title of respect into one of reproach. “On you the blame, and almost I hope you end up wearing it.” Syagrios strode off with the straight, proud back of a man who’s had the last word.

  Watching him go, Phostis felt a burden lift from his spirit, as if the sun had come out to brighten a gloomy day. He also had to stifle a burst of laughter. In spite of having just come out of starving Strabon’s house, he was hungry.

  Since unlike Strabon he was not about to waste away and die of hunger, he kept that to himself. He didn’t want Olyvria rounding on him as she had on Syagrios. If anything was more likely to bring back the watchdog, he couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  Olyvria was looking at him with a quizzical expression. He realized she was left as much at a loss by Syagrios’ departure as was he. “What shall we do now?” she asked, perhaps hoping he could think of something.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I really haven’t seen enough of Etchmiadzin to know what you can do around here.” Not much before the Thanasioi took over the town, and less now, he guessed.

  “Let’s just amble about, then, and see where our feet take us,” she said.

  “That’s all right with me.” Short of a trip to the torturer, anything Olyvria suggested would have been all right with Phostis. He looked for grass to sprout in the streets, flowers to burst into bloom, and birds to start singing in winter, all because she’d managed to outbluff Syagrios.

  Their feet led them to a street of dyers. That the men there followed the gleaming path didn’t keep their shops from smelling of stale piss, just like the establishments of perfectly orthodox dyers back in Videssos the city. In the same way, Thanasiot carpenters had hands crisscrossed with scars and Thanasiot bakers faces permanently reddened from peering into hot ovens.

  “It all seems so—ordinary,” Phostis said after a while. Dull was the other word that came to mind, but he suppressed it. “For most folk, it’s as if being a Thanasiot doesn’t change much in their lives.”

  That bothered him. To his way of thinking, heresy and orthodoxy—whichever was which in this dispute—should have been easy to tell apart at a glance. But, on further reflection, he wondered why. Unless they chose Strabon’s path out of the world, the Thanasioi had to make their way in it, and only so many ways of doing that were possible. The dyeshops probably stank of urine in Mashiz, too; carpenters would sometimes gouge themselves with chisels; and bakers would need to make sure their loaves didn’t burn.

  Olyvria said, “The difference is the gleaming path, it’s standing aside from the world as well as one can, not thinking riches the only end in life, seeking to satisfy the spirit rather than the baser impulses of the body.”

  “I suppose so,” Phostis said. They walked a little farther while he ruminated on that. Then he said, “May I ask you something? For all the ribbons on my cage, I know I’m pretty much a prisoner here, so I don’t mean to make you angry, but there is something I’d like to learn, if giving the answer doesn’t offend you.”

  Olyvria turned toward him. Her eyes were wide with curiosity, her mouth slightly open. She looked very young, and very lovely. “Ask,” she said at once. “You’re here to lear
n about the gleaming path, after all. How will you learn if you don’t ask?”

  “All right, I will.” Phostis thought for a little while; the question he had in mind needed to be framed carefully. At last he said, “In the room in the tunnel under Digenis’ temple, what you said there—”

  “Aha!” Olyvria stuck out her tongue at him. “I thought it would be something about that, just from the way you went all around it like a man feeling for a goldpiece in the middle of a nettle patch.”

  Phostis felt his face heat. By the way Olyvria giggled, his embarrassment was also plain to the eye. Even so, he stubbornly plowed ahead; in some ways—though he would have hotly denied it—he was very much like Krispos. “What you said under there, when you tried to lure me to you, about the pleasure of love being sweet, and no sin?”

  “What about it?” Olyvria lost some—though not all—of her mischievous air as she saw how serious he was.

  What he really wanted to ask was how she knew—or, even more to the point, what she would have done had he lain down on the bed beside her and taken her in his arms. But he did not think he was in a position where he could safely put either of those questions. So instead he said, “If you hold to Thanasios’ gleaming path as strongly as you say, how could you make such a claim? Doesn’t it go straight against everything you profess to believe?”

  “I could answer that any number of ways,” Olyvria said. “I could tell you, for instance, that it was none of your business.”

  “So you could, and I would beg your pardon,” he said. “I said from the start that I didn’t want to offend you.”

  Olyvria went on as if he had not spoken: “Or I could say I was doing as Digenis and my father bade me do, and trusted them to judge the rights and wrongs of it.” Her eyes twinkled again. He knew she was toying with him, but what could he do about it?

  “Or,” she went on, maddeningly disingenuous, “I could say Thanasios countenanced dissimulation when it serves spreading the truth, and that you have no idea what my true feelings on the subject are.”

  “I know I don’t. That’s what I was trying to find out, your true feelings on the subject.” Phostis felt like an old, spavined plowhorse trying to trap a dragonfly without benefit of net. He tramped on, straight ahead, while Olyvria flitted, evaded, and occasionally flew so close to the end of his nose that his eyes crossed when he tried to see her clearly.

  “Those are just some examples of what I might say,” she noted, ticking them off on her fingertips. “If you’d like others, I might also say—”

  As if the old plowhorse suddenly snorted and startled the beautiful, glittering insect, he broke in, “What would you say that’s so, by the good god?”

  “I’d say—” But then Olyvria shook her head and looked away from him. “No, I wouldn’t say anything at all, Phostis. Better if I don’t.”

  He wanted to shake truth from her, but she was not a saltcellar. “Why?” he howled, months of frustration boiled into a single despairing word.

  “Just—better if I don’t.” Olyvria still held her head averted. In a small voice, she added, “I think we ought to go back to the fortress now.”

  Phostis didn’t think that, nor anything like it, but walked with her all the same. In the inner ward stood Syagrios, talking with someone almost as disreputable-looking as he was. The ruffian left his—partner in crime?—ambled over, and attached himself to Phostis like a shadow returning from a brief holiday. In an unsettling sort of way, Phostis was almost glad to have him back. He’d certainly made a hash of his first little while in Etchmiadzin on his own.

  DIGENIS’ ROBE HAD FALLEN OPEN, DISPLAYING RIBS LIKE LADDER rungs. His thighs were thinner than his knees. Even his ears seemed to be wasting away. But his eyes still blazed defiance. “To the ice with you, your false Majesty,” he growled when Krispos came into his cell. “Your way would have sent me beyond the sun quicker, but I gain, I gain.”

  To Krispos, the firebrand priest looked more as if he lost. Lean to begin with, now he looked like a peasant in a village after three years of blighted crops. But for those eerily compelling eyes, he might have been a skeleton that refused to turn back into a man.

  “By the good god,” Krispos muttered when that thought struck him, “now I understand the mime troupe.”

  “Which one, Your Majesty?” asked Zaidas, who still labored fruitlessly to extract truth from the dwindling Digenis.

  “The one with the fellow in the suit of bones,” Krispos answered. “He was supposed to be a Thanasiot starving himself to death, that’s what he was. Now, were the mimes heretics, too, or just mocking their beliefs?” Something else occurred to him. “And isn’t it a fine note when mimes know more about what’s going on with the faith than my own ecumenical patriarch?”

  Digenis’ mocking laugh flayed his ears. “Of Oxeites’ ignorance no possible doubt can exist.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Krispos said, though down deep he knew tractability was one of the qualities that had gained Oxeites the blue boots. If only he’d been more tractable about letting me do what I wanted with this wretch here, the Avtokrator thought. But Oxeites, like any good bureaucrat, protected his own.

  Krispos sat down on a three-legged stool to see if Zaidas would have any better luck today. His chief wizard swore his presence inhibited nothing. Zaidas at least had courage, to be willing to labor on in the presence of his Avtokrator. What he did not have, unfortunately, was success.

  He was trying something new today, Krispos saw, or maybe something so old he hoped its time had come round again. At any rate, the implements he took from his carpetbag were unfamiliar. But before the Emperor saw them in action, a panting messenger from the palaces poked his head into Digenis’ cell.

  “What’s happened?” Krispos asked suspiciously; his orders were that he be left undisturbed in his visits here save for only the most important news…and the most important news was all too often bad.

  “May it please Your Majesty,” the messenger began, and then paused to pant some more. While he caught his breath, Krispos worried. That opening, lately, had given him good cause to worry. But the fellow surprised him, saying, “May it please Your Majesty, the eminent Iakovitzes has returned to Videssos the city from his embassy to Makuran and awaits your pleasure at the imperial residence.”

  “Well, by the good god, there’s word that truly does please me,” Krispos exclaimed. He turned to Zaidas. “Carry on here without me, and may Phos grant you good fortune. If you glean anything from this bag of bones, report it to me at once.”

  “Certainly, Your Majesty,” Zaidas said.

  Digenis laughed again. “The catamite goes off to pleasure his defiler.”

  “That is a lie, one of so many you spew,” Krispos said coldly. The Halogai fell in around him. As he went up the stairs that led to the doorway of the government office building, he found himself laughing. He’d have to tell that one to Iakovitzes. His longtime associate would laugh, too, not least because he’d wish the lie were true. Iakovitzes never made any secret of his fondness for stalwart youths, and had tried again and again to seduce Krispos when Krispos, newly arrived in Videssos the city, was in his service.

  Barsymes greeted him when he returned to the imperial residence. “Good day, Your Majesty. I’ve taken the liberty of installing the eminent Iakovitzes in the small dining chamber in the south hallway. He requested hot mulled wine, which was fetched to him.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Krispos said. “I can’t think of a better way to fight the winter chill.”

  Iakovitzes rose from his chair as Krispos came into the room where he sat. He started to prostrate himself; Krispos waved for him not to bother. With a smug nod, Iakovitzes returned to his seat. He was a well-preserved seventy, plump, his hair and beard dyed dark to make him seem younger, with a complexion on the florid side and eyes that warned—truly—he had a temper.

  “Good to see you, by Phos,” Krispos exclaimed. “I’ve wished you were here a great many times the past few m
onths.”

  On the table in front of Iakovitzes lay a scribe’s three-paneled writing tablet. He opened it, used a stylus to scribble rapid words on the wax, then passed Krispos the tablet. “I’ve wished I were back a great many times myself. I’m bloody sick of mutton.”

  “Sup with me this evening, then,” Krispos said. “What do they say? ‘When in Videssos the city, eat fish.’ I’ll feast you till you grow fins.”

  Iakovitzes made a strange gobbling noise that served him for laughter. “Make it tentacles, if you’d be so kind,” he wrote. “Squid, octopus…lobster, come to think of it, has no tentacles, but then lobster is lobster, in itself a sufficient justification. By the good god, it makes me wish I could lick my lips.”

  “I wish you could, too, old friend, and taste in fullness as well,” Krispos said. Iakovitzes had only the stump of his tongue; twenty years before, Harvas Black-Robe had torn it from his mouth when he was on an embassy to the evil sorcerer.

  The wound—and the spell placed on it to defeat healing—had almost been the death of him. But he’d rallied, even thrived. Krispos knew a great part of his own persona would have been lost had he suffered Iakovitzes’ mutilation. He wrote well enough, but never had been fluent with a pen in his hand. Iakovitzes, though, wielded pen or stylus with such vim that, reading his words, Krispos still sometimes heard the living voice that had been two decades silent.

  Iakovitzes took back the tablet, wrote, and returned it to Krispos. “It’s not so bad, Your Majesty: not nearly so bad as sitting down to table with a bad cold in your head, for instance. Half your taste, or maybe more, I’ve found, is in your nose, not in your mouth. Besides, staying in Mashiz turned into a bore. The only folk who read Videssian seemed as old and wrinkled as I am. You have no notion how hard it is to seduce a pretty boy when he can’t understand you.”