“Well? What happened to it?” Stankos asked.
“It’s not there anymore,” Roukhas said bleakly. “We watched the smoke go up into the sky.”
No one spoke of rebellion again. To Krispos, charging out against the Kubratoi with sword and lance and bow and driving them all back north over the Astris River to the plains from which they’d come would have been the most glorious thing in the world. It was one of his playmates’ favorite games. In truth, though, the wild men were the ones with the arms and armor and horses and, more important still, both the skill and will to use them.
Farmers endure, Krispos thought. He didn’t like just enduring. He wondered if that meant he shouldn’t be a farmer. What else could he be, though? He had no idea.
THE VILLAGE GOT THROUGH THE WINTER, WHICH WAS FIERCER than any Krispos remembered. Even the feast and celebrations of Midwinter’s Day, the day when the sun finally turned north in the sky, had to be forgotten because of the blizzard raging outside.
Krispos grew to hate being cooped up and idle in the house for weeks on end. South of the mountains, even midwinter gave days when he could go out to play in the snow. Those were few and far between here. Even a freezing trip out to empty the chamber pot on the dung heap or help his father haul back firewood made him glad to return to the warm—if stuffy and smoky—air inside.
Spring came at last and brought with it mud almost as oppressive as the snow had been. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and weeding followed, plunging Krispos back into the endless round of farm work and making him long for the lazy days of winter once more. That fall, the Kubratoi came to take their unfair share of the harvest once more.
The year after that, they came a couple of other times, riding through the fields and trampling down long swathes of growing grain. As they rode, they whooped and yelled and grinned at the helpless farmers whose labor they were wrecking.
“Drunk, the lot of ’em,” Krispos’ father said the night after it happened the first time, his mouth tight with disgust. “Pity they didn’t fall off their horses and break their fool necks—that’d send ’em down to Skotos where they belong.”
“Better to thank Phos that they didn’t come into the village and hurt people instead of plants,” Krispos’ mother said. Phostis only scowled and shook his head.
Listening, Krispos found himself agreeing with his father. What the Kubratoi had done was wrong, and they’d done it on purpose. If he deliberately did something wrong, he got walloped for it. The villagers were not strong enough to wallop the Kubratoi, so let them spend eternity with the dark god and see how they liked that.
When fall came, of course, the Kubratoi took as much grain as they had before. If, thanks to them, less was left for the village, that was the village’s hard luck.
The wild men played those same games the next year. That year, too, a woman who had gone down to the stream to bathe never came back. When the villagers went looking for her, they found hoofprints from several horses in the clay by the streambank.
Krispos’ father held his mother very close when the news swept through the village. “Now I will thank Phos, Tatze,” he said. “It could have been you.”
One dawn late in the third spring after Krispos came to Kubrat, barking dogs woke the villagers even before they would have risen on their own. Rubbing their eyes, they stumbled from their houses to find themselves staring at a couple of dozen armed and mounted Kubratoi. The riders carried torches. They scowled down from horseback at the confused and frightened farmers.
Krispos’ hair tried to rise at the back of his neck. He hadn’t thought, lately, about the night the Kubratoi had kidnapped him and everyone else in his village. Now the memories—and the terror—of that night flooded back. But where else could the wild men take them from here? Why would they want to?
One of the riders drew his sword. The villagers drew back a pace. Someone moaned. But the Kubrati did not attack with the curved blade. He pointed instead, westward. “You come with us,” he said in gutturally accented Videssian. “Now.”
Krispos’ father asked the questions the boy was thinking: “Where? Why?”
“Where I say, man bound to the earth. Because I say.” This time the horseman’s gesture with the sword was threatening.
At nine, Krispos knew more of the world and its harsh ways than he had at six. Still, he did not hesitate. He sprang toward the Kubrati. His father grabbed at him to haul him back, too late. “You leave him alone!” Krispos shouted up at the rider.
The man snarled at him, teeth gleaming white in the torchlight’s flicker. The sword swung up. Krispos’ mother screamed. Then the wild man hesitated. He thrust his torch down almost into Krispos’ face. Suddenly, astonishingly, the snarl became a grin. The Kubrati said something in his own language. His comrades exclaimed, then roared laughter.
He dropped back into Videssian. “Ha, little khagan, you forget me? Good thing I remember you, or you die this morning. You defy me once before, in Videssos. How does farmer boy come to have man’s—Kubrati man’s—spirit in him?”
Krispos hadn’t recognized the rider who’d captured him and his family. If the man recognized him, though, he would turn it to his advantage. “Why are you here? What do you want with us now?”
“To take you away.” The scowl came back to the Kubrati’s face. “Videssos has paid ransom for you. We have to let you go.” He sounded anything but delighted at the prospect.
“Ransom?” The word spread through the villagers, at first slowly and in hushed, disbelieving tones, then louder and louder till they all shouted it, nearly delirious with joy. “Ransom!”
They danced round the Kubratoi, past hatred and fear dissolved in the powerful water of freedom. It was, Krispos thought, like a Midwinter’s Day celebration somehow magically dropped into springtime. Soon riders and villagers were hoisting wooden mugs of beer together. Barrel after barrel was broken open. Little would be left for later, but what did that matter? They would not be here later. A new cry took the place of “Ransom!”
“We’re going home!”
Evdokia was puzzled. “What does everyone mean, Krispos, we’re going home? Isn’t this home?”
“No, silly, the place Mother and Father talk about all the time is our real home.”
“Oh.” His sister barely remembered Videssos. “How is it different?”
“It’s…” Krispos wasn’t too clear on that himself, not after almost three years. “It’s better,” he finished at last. That seemed to satisfy her. He wondered if it was true. His own memories of life south of the mountains had grown hazy.
The Kubratoi seemed in as big a hurry to get rid of their Videssian captives as they had been to get them into Kubrat in the first place. Evdokia had trouble keeping up; sometimes Krispos’ father had to carry her for a stretch, even if it shamed her. Krispos made the three days of hard marching on his own, but they left his feet blistered and him sleeping like a dead man each night.
At last the villagers and hundreds more like them reached a broad, shallow valley. With an eye rapidly growing wiser to the ways of farming, Krispos saw that it was better land than what his village tilled. He also saw several large and splendid yurts and, in the distance, the flocks by which the Kubratoi lived. That explained why the valley was not farmed.
The wild men herded the Videssians into pens much like those in which the peasants kept goats. They posted guards around them so no one would even think of clambering over the branches and sneaking off. Fear began to replace the farmer’s jubilation. “Are we truly to be ransomed,” someone shouted, “or sold like so many beasts?”
“You keep still! Big ceremony coming tomorrow,” yelled a Kubrati who spoke Videssian. He climbed up onto the fencing of the pen and pointed. “See over there. There tents of Videssos’ men, and Empire’s banner, too. No tricks now.”
Krispos looked in the direction the man’s arm had given. He was too short to see out of the pen. “Pick me up, Father!”
His father did, then,
with a grunt of effort, set the boy on his shoulders. Krispos saw the tops of several square tents not far from the yurts he’d noticed before. Sure enough, a sky-blue flag with a gold sunburst on it snapped in front of one of them. “Is that Videssos’ banner?” he asked. Try as he would, he could not recall it.
“Aye, it’s ours,” his father said. “The tax collector always used to show it when he came. I’m gladder to see it now than I was then, I’ll tell you that.” He put Krispos down.
“Let me see! My turn! Let me see!” Evdokia squealed. Phostis sighed, then smiled. He picked up his daughter.
THE NEXT MORNING, THE PEASANTS GOT FAR BETTER FARE THAN they’d had on the trek to the valley: roasted mutton and beef, with plenty of the flat wheatcakes the Kubratoi baked in place of leavened bread. Krispos ate till his belly felt like bursting from joy and he washed down the meat with a long swig from a leather bucket of mare’s milk.
“I wonder what the ceremony the wild man talked about will be like,” his mother said.
“I wish we could see more of it,” his father added. “Weren’t for us, after all, it wouldn’t be happening. Not right to leave us penned up while it’s going on.”
A little later, the Kubratoi let the farmers out of the pens. “This way! This way!” the nomads who spoke Videssian shouted, urging the crowd along toward the yurts and tents.
Krispos spotted the wild men he had yelled at on the day he was captured and on the day he started back to freedom. The Kubrati was peering into the mass of peasants as they walked by him. His eye caught Krispos’. He grinned. “Ho, little khagan, I look for you. You come with me—you part of ceremony.”
“What, me? Why?” As he spoke, though, Krispos cut across the flow of people toward the Kubrati.
The now-dismounted rider took him by the shoulder, as his father did sometimes. “Khagan Omurtag, he want some Videssian to talk to envoy from Empire, stand for all you people in magic, while envoy paying gold to get you back. I tell him about you, how bold you are. He say all right.”
“Oh. Oh, my!” Excitement ousted fear. Khagan Omurtag, in Krispos’ imagination, was nine feet high, with teeth like a wolf’s. And an envoy from the Avtokrator should be even more magnificent—tall, handsome, heroic, clad in gilded chain mail, and carrying an enormous sword….
Reality was less dramatic, as reality has a way of being. The Kubratoi had built a little platform of hides stretched across timbers. None of the four men who stood on it was nine feet tall, none wore gilded chain mail. Then the wild man lifted Krispos, and he was on the platform, too.
“Pretty boy,” murmured a short, sour-faced man in a robe of green silk shot through with silver threads. He turned to the Kubrati standing across from him. “All right, Omurtag, he’s here. Get on with your miserable heathen rite, if you think you must.”
Krispos waited for the sky to fall. No matter that the khagan of Kubrat was neither especially tall nor especially lupine—was, in fact, quite an ordinary-looking Kubrati save that his furs were of marten and sable, not fox and rabbit. He was the khagan. Talking that way to him had to cost a man his head.
But Omurtag only threw back his head and laughed. “Sweet as always, Iakovitzes,” he said. His Videssian was as smooth and polished as the envoy’s, and a good deal more so than Krispos’. “The magic seals the bargain, as well you know.”
“Phos watches over all bargains from above the sun.” Iakovitzes nodded to the man in a blue robe behind him. Dim memories stirred in Krispos. He’d seen such men with shaved heads before, though not in Kubrat; the fellow was a priest.
“So you say,” Omurtag answered. “My enaree here knows the spirits of ground and wind. They are closer than any lofty god above the sun, and I trust them further.”
The enaree was the first grown man Krispos had ever seen who cut off his beard. It made him look like an enormous little boy—till one looked into his eyes. They saw farther than boys’…farther than men’s had any business seeing, too, Krispos thought nervously.
The khagan turned to him. “Come here, lad.”
For a split second, Krispos hung back. Then he thought that he had been chosen for his boldness. He straightened his back, put his chin up, and walked over to Omurtag. The tight-stretched hides vibrated under his feet, as if they were an enormous drumhead.
“We have your people,” Omurtag intoned, taking hold of Krispos’ arm with his left hand. His grip was firm and hard. His right hand plucked a dagger from his belt, set it at the boy’s throat. Krispos stood very still. The khagan went on, “They are ours, to do with as we will.”
“The Empire has gold and will pay for their safe return.” Iakovitzes sounded, of all things, bored. Krispos was suddenly sure he’d performed this ceremony many times before.
“Let us see that gold,” the khagan said. His voice was still formal, but anything but bored. He stared avidly at the pouch Iakovitzes withdrew from within a fold of his robe.
The Videssian envoy drew out a single bright coin, gave it to Omurtag. “Let this goldpiece stand for all, as the boy does,” Iakovitzes said.
Omurtag passed the coin to the enaree. He muttered over it; the hand that was not holding it moved in tiny passes. Krispos saw the Videssian priest scowl, but the man held his peace. The enaree spoke in the Kubrati tongue. “He declares it is good gold,” Omurtag said to Iakovitzes.
“Of course it’s good gold,” Iakovitzes snapped, breaking the ritual. “The Empire hasn’t coined anything else for hundreds of years. Should we start now, it would be for something more important than ransoming ragged peasants.”
The khagan laughed out loud. “I think your tongue was stung by a wasp one day, Iakovitzes,” he said, then returned to the pattern of the ceremony. “He declares it is good gold. Thus the people are yours.” He gently pushed Krispos toward Iakovitzes.
The envoy’s touch was warm, alive. He moved his hand on Krispos’ back in a way that was strange and familiar at the same time. “Hello, pretty boy,” Iakovitzes murmured. Krispos recognized the tone and realized why the caress had that familiarity to it: his father and mother acted like this with each other when they felt like making love.
Having lived all his life in a one-room house with his parents, having slept in the same bed with them, he knew what sex was about. That variations could exist, variations that might include him and Iakovitzes, had not occurred to him before, though. Now that it did, he found he did not much care for it. He moved half a step away from the Avtokrator’s envoy.
Iakovitzes jerked back his hand as if surprised to discover what it had been up to. Glancing at him, Krispos doubted he was. His face was a mask that must have taken years to perfect. Seeing Krispos’ eye upon him, he gave a tiny shrug. If you don’t want it, too bad for you, he seemed to say.
Aloud, the words he spoke were quite different. “It is accomplished,” he said loudly. Then he turned to the crowd of peasants gathered in front of the platform. “People of Videssos, you are redeemed!” he cried. “The Phos-guarded Avtokrator Rhaptes redeems you from your long and horrid captivity in this dark and barbarous land, from your toil under the degrading domination of brutal and terrible masters. Masters? No, rather let me call them robbers, for they robbed you of the liberty rightfully yours…”
The speech went on for some time. Krispos was at first impressed and then overwhelmed with the buckets of big words Iakovitzes poured over the heads of the farmers. Over our heads is right, the boy thought. He was missing one word in three, and doubted anyone else in the crowd was doing much better.
He yawned. Seeing that, Omurtag grinned and winked. Iakovitzes, caught up now in the full flow of his rhetoric, never noticed.
The khagan waggled a finger. Krispos walked back over to him. Again Iakovitzes paid no attention, though Krispos felt the eyes of both priest and enaree upon him.
“Here, lad,” Omurtag said—softly, so as not to disrupt Iakovitzes’ speech. “You take this, as a reminder of the day.” He handed Krispos the goldpiece Iakovitzes had
given him to symbolize the Videssians’ ransoming.
Behind Iakovitzes, the blue-robed priest of Phos jerked violently, as if a bee had stung him. He made the circular sun-sign over the left side of his breast. And Omurtag’s own enaree grabbed the khagan and whispered harshly and urgently into his ear.
Omurtag shoved the seer aside, so hard that the enaree almost tumbled off the edge of the platform. The khagan snarled something at him in the Kubrati tongue, then returned to Videssian to tell Krispos, “The fool says that, since this coin was used in our ceremony here, with it I have given you the Videssian people. Whatever will you do with them, little farmer boy?”
He laughed uproariously at his own wit, loud enough to make Iakovitzes pause and glare at him before resuming his harangue. Krispos laughed, too. Past tunic and sandals—and now this coin—he had never owned anything. And the idea of having a whole people was absurd, anyhow.
“Go on back to your mother and father,” Omurtag said when he had control of himself again. Krispos hopped down from the platform. He kept tight hold of the goldpiece Omurtag had given him.
“THE SOONER WE’RE OUT OF KUBRAT AND THE FASTER WE’RE BACK in civilization, the better,” Iakovitzes declared to whoever would listen. He pressed the pace back to Videssos harder than the Kubratoi had when they were taking the peasants away.
The redeemed Videssians did not leave by the same winding, narrow pass through which they had entered Kubrat. They used a wider, easier route some miles farther west. An old graveled highway ran down it, one that became broad and well maintained on the Videssian side of the mountains.
“You’d think the Kubrati road used to be part of this one here,” Krispos remarked.
Neither of his parents answered. They were too worn with walking and with keeping Evdokia on her feet to have energy left over for speculation.
But the priest who had gone to Kubrat with Iakovitzes heard. His name, Krispos had learned, was Pyrrhos. Ever since Omurtag gave the boy that goldpiece, Pyrrhos had been around a good deal, as if keeping an eye on him. Now, from muleback, the priest said, “You speak the truth, lad. Once the road was one, for once the land was one. Once the whole world, near enough, was one.”
The Tale of Krispos Page 3