The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  “Their army’s real, then,” Krispos said, more than a little surprised. Trokoundos would not be pleased to learn his sorcery had gone astray.

  “Majesty, we sneaked close enough to smell the shit in their slit trenches,” the scout answered. “You don’t get a whole lot realer than that.”

  Krispos laughed. “True enough. Two goldpieces to each of you for your courage. Now go get what rest you can.”

  The scouts saluted and hurried off toward their tents. Krispos thought about going back to bed, too, decided not to bother. Better to watch the sun come up than to toss and turn and think about stakes…

  The eastern rim of the sky grew gray, then the pale bluish-white that seems to stretch the eye to some infinite distance, then pink. When the sun crawled above the horizon, Krispos bowed to it as if to Phos himself, recited the creed, and spat between his feet to show he rejected Skotos. Most of the time, he hardly thought about that part of the ritual. Not now. Imbros reminded him of what he was rejecting.

  The camp stirred with the sun, at first slowly, blindly, like a plant’s silent striving toward light, but then with greater purpose as horns rang out to rout sleepers from tents and prod them into the routine of another day. They lined up with bowls in front of cookpots where barley porridge bubbled; gnawed at hard bread, cheese, and onions; gulped wine under the watchful eyes of underofficers who made sure they did not gulp too much; and tended to their horses so the animals would also be ready for the day’s work ahead.

  Krispos went back to his tent and armed himself. He swung himself up onto Progress and rode over to the musicians. At his command, they played Assemble. The troopers gathered before them. Krispos raised a hand for silence and waited until he had it.

  “Soldiers of Videssos,” he said, hoping everyone could hear him, “the enemy waits for us ahead. You’ve seen the kind of foe he is, how he loves to slay those who can’t fight back.” A low growl ran through the army. Krispos went on, “Now we can pay Harvas back for everything, for the slaughters in Develtos last year and Imbros now, and for Agapetos’ men, and Mavros’, too. Will we turn aside?”

  “No!” the men roared. “Never!”

  “Then forward, and fight bravely!” Krispos drew his saber and held it high overhead. The soldiers whooped and cheered. They were eager to fight; Krispos needed no fancy turns of phrase to inspire them today. That was as well—he knew Anthimos, for instance, had been a far better speaker than he would ever be. He owned neither the gift nor the inclination for wrapping around his ideas of the flights of fancy that Videssian rhetoric demanded. His only gift, such as it was, was for plain thoughts plainly spoken.

  As the army left camp, Krispos told Sarkis, “We’ll want plenty of scouts out in front of us, and farther ahead than usual.”

  “It’s taken care of, Your Majesty,” the Vaspurakaner officer said with a small, tight smile. “The country ahead reminds me all too much of the land where I grew up. You soon learn to check out a pass before you send everyone through, or you die young.” He chuckled. “I suppose, over the generations, it improves the breed.”

  “Dismount some of those scouts, too,” Krispos said as a new worry struck him. “We’ll want to spy out the sides of the pass, not just the bottom, and they can’t do that from horseback.” He stopped, flustered. So much for plain thoughts plainly spoken. “You know what I mean.”

  “Aye, Your Majesty. It’s taken care of,” Sarkis repeated. He sketched a salute. “For one who came so late to soldiering, you’ve learned a good deal. Have I told you of the saying of my people, ‘Sneaky as a prince—?’”

  Krispos cut him off. “Yes, you have.” He knew he was rude, but he was also nervous. The scouts had just followed the western jog of the pass and disappeared from sight. He clucked to Progress, leaned forward in the saddle, and urged the gelding up to a fast trot with the pressure of knees and heels.

  Then he rounded that jog himself. The breastwork, of turf and stones and brush and whatever else had been handy, stood a few hundred yards ahead, blocking the narrowest part of the pass. Behind it, Krispos saw at last the warriors who had ravaged the Empire so savagely.

  The big, fierce, fair-haired men saw him, too, or the imperial banner that floated near him. They jeered and brandished—weapons? No, Krispos saw; Harvas’ men were holding up stout stakes carved to a point at both ends—impaling stakes.

  Fury filled him, rage more perfect and absolute than any he had ever known. He wanted to slay with his own sword every marauder in front of him. Only a wild charge by all his men seemed a bearable second best. He filled his lungs to cry out the order.

  But something cold and calculating dwelt within him, too, something that would not let him give way to impulse, no matter how tempting. He thought again and shouted, “Arrows!”

  Bowstrings thrummed as the Videssian archers went to work from horseback. Instead of their stakes, the Halogai lifted yardwide shields of wood to turn aside the shafts. They were not bowmen; they could not reply.

  Here and there, all along the enemy line, men crumpled or lurched backward, clutching at their wounds and shrieking. But the raiders wore mail shirts and helms; even shafts that slipped between shields and over the rampart were no sure kills. And however steeped in wickedness they might have been, Harvas’ followers were not cowards. The archery stung them. It could do no more.

  By the time he saw that, Krispos had full control of himself once more. “Can we flank them out?” he demanded of Mammianos.

  “It’s steep, broken ground to either side of that breastwork,” the general answered. “Better going for foot than for horse. Still, worth a try, I suppose, and the cheapest way to go about it. If we can get in their rear, they’re done for.”

  Despite his doubts, the general yelled orders. Couriers dashed off to relay them to the soldiers on both wings. Several companies peeled off to try the rough terrain on the flanks. Harvas’ Halogai rushed men up the slopes of the pass to head them off.

  The northerners had known what they were about when they built their barricade; they had walled off all the ground worth fighting on. The horses of their Videssian foes had to pick their way forward step by step. Afoot, Harvas’ men were rather more agile, but they, too, scrambled, stumbled, and often fell.

  Some did not get up again; now that the foe was away from cover and concerned more with his footing than his shield, he grew more vulnerable to archery. But the Videssians could not simply shoot their way to victory. They had to force the northerners from their ground. And at close quarters, the foot soldiers gave as good as they got, or better.

  Saber and light lance against axe and slashing sword—Krispos watched his men battle the Halogai who followed Harvas. Sudden pain made him wonder if he was wounded until he realized he had his lip tight between his teeth. With a distinct effort of will, he made himself relax. A moment later the pain returned. This time he ignored it.

  For all the encouragement he shouted, for all the courage the Videssian cavalry displayed, the terrain proved too rugged for them to advance against determined foes. Krispos wished Harvas’ northerners were less brave than his own guardsmen. They did not seem so. He watched a Haloga with a lance driven deep into his side hack from the saddle the man who had skewered him before he, too, toppled.

  “No help for it,” Mammianos bawled in his ear. “If we want ’em, we’ll have to go through ’em, not around.”

  “We want ’em,” Krispos said. Mammianos nodded and turned to the musicians. They raised horns and pipes to their lips, poised sticks over drums. The wild notes of the charge echoed brassily from the boulders that studded both slopes of the pass. The Videssians in the front rank raised a cheer and spurred toward the breastwork that barred their way north.

  The front was too narrow for more than a fraction of the imperial army to engage the enemy at once. Rhisoulphos, who led the regiments just behind the van, shouted for his troops to hold up. A gap opened between them and the men ahead.

  When Krispos looked bac
k and saw that gap, his own suspicions about his father-in-law and Dara’s warning came together in a hard certainty of treason. He slapped a courier on the shoulder. “Fetch me Rhisoulphos, at once. If he won’t come, either drag him here or kill him.” The rider stared, then set spurs to his horse. With an angry squeal, the beast bounded away.

  Krispos’ fist gripped the hilt of his saber as tightly as if that were Rhisoulphos’ neck. Leave the head of the army to face Harvas’ howling killers by itself, would he? Krispos was so sure Rhisoulphos would not willingly accompany his courier that, when his father-in-law did ride up to him, the best he could do was splutter, “By the good god, what are you playing at?”

  “Giving our troops room to retreat in, of course, Your Majesty,” Rhisoulphos answered. If he was a traitor, he did it marvelously well. So what? I already know he’s good at that, Krispos thought. But Rhisoulphos went on, “It’s a standard ploy when fighting Halogai, Your Majesty. Feigning a withdrawal will often lure them out of their position so we can wheel about and take them while they’re in disorder.”

  Krispos glanced over at Mammianos. The fat general nodded. “Oh,” Krispos said. “Good enough.” His ears were hot, but his helmet covered them so no one could see the flame.

  The Videssians at the barriers slashed and thrust at Harvas’ men, who chopped at them and their horses both. The shrieks and oaths dinned through the pass. Then above them rose a long, mournful call. The horsemen wheeled their mounts and broke off combat.

  The northerners screamed abuse in their own language, in the speech of the Kubratoi, and in broken Videssian. A couple of men started to scramble over the breastwork to pursue the retreating imperials. Their own comrades dragged them back by main force.

  “Oh, a plague on them!” Mammianos said when he saw that. “Why can’t they make it easy for us?”

  “That’s better discipline than they usually show,” Rhisoulphos said. “The military manuals claim that tactic hardly ever fails against the northerners.”

  “I don’t think Harvas shows up in the military manuals,” Krispos said.

  One corner of Rhisoulphos’ mouth twitched upward. “I suspect you’re right, Your Majesty.” He pointed. “But there he stands, whether he’s in the manuals or not.”

  Krispos’ eyes followed Rhisoulphos’ finger. Of course that tall figure behind the enemy line had to be Harvas Black-Robe; none of his followers was garbed in similar style. Despite the chieftain’s sobriquet, Krispos had looked for someone gaudily clad—a ruler needed to stand out from his subjects. So Harvas did, but by virtue of plainness rather than splendor. Had his hooded robe been blue rather than black, he could have passed for a Videssian priest.

  Regardless of how he dressed, no doubt he led. Halogai heavily ran here and there at his bidding, doing their best to ignore the weight of mail on their shoulders. And when Harvas raised his arms—those wide black sleeves flapped like vultures’ wings—the northerners held their places. For Halogai, that was the more remarkable.

  Mammianos glowered at the northerners as if their good order personally affronted him. With a wheezy sigh, he said, “If they won’t come out after us, we’ll have to get in there nose to nose with them and drive them away.” The words plainly tasted bad in his mouth; getting in there nose to nose was not a style of fighting upon which the subtle imperials looked kindly.

  But when subtlety failed, brute force remained. As captains dressed their lines and troopers reached over their shoulders to see how many arrows their quivers held, the fierce notes of the charge rang out once more. The Videssians thundered toward the breastwork ahead. “Krispos!” they shouted, and “Imbros!”

  Harvas raised his arms. This time he pointed not toward his soldiers or their rampart, but up the slope of the pass. Not far from Krispos, Trokoundos reeled in the saddle. “Call the men back, Majesty!” he cried, clinging to his seat more by determination than anything else. “Call them back!”

  Krispos and his generals stared at the mage. “By the good god, why should I?” Krispos demanded angrily.

  “Battle magic,” Trokoundos croaked. The roar of boulders bounding downslope drowned him out.

  Because he was looking at Trokoundos, Krispos did not see the first great stones leap free of the ground on which they had placidly rested for years, perhaps for centuries. That night one of the soldiers who had seen them said, “You ever watch a rabbit that’s all of a sudden spooked by a hound? That’s what those rocks were doing, except they didn’t jump every which way. They came down on us.”

  The noise the boulders made as they crashed into the Videssian cavalrymen was the noise that might have come from a smithy in the instant a giant stepped on it. Horses went down as if scythed, pitching riders off their backs. The beasts behind them could not stop fast enough and crashed into them and into the stones. That only made the chaos worse.

  The men and horses of the very foremost ranks were almost upon the breastwork when the avalanche began. Soldiers turned their heads to gape at what had happened to their comrades. Some drew rein in consternation; other pressed on toward the barricade. Now the Halogai, howling with ferocious glee, swarmed over it to meet them. The imperials at the head of the charge fought back desperately. No one could come to their aid through the writhing tangle behind them.

  Krispos watched and cursed and slammed a fist against his thigh as Harvas’ northerners overwhelmed his men one by one. Harvas raised his arms and pointed again. More boulders sprang from their proper places and crashed down on the Videssian army’s van.

  “Make them stop!” Krispos screamed to Trokoundos.

  “I wish I could.” The wizard’s face was haggard, his eyes wild. “He shouldn’t be able to do this. The stress, the excitement of combat weaken magic’s grip, even if the sorceries are readied in advance. I’ve tried counterspells—they go awry, as they should.”

  “What can we do, then?”

  “Majesty, I have not the power to stand against Harvas, not even with my colleagues here.” Trokoundos sounded as if admitting that cost him physical pain. “Perhaps with more mages, masters from the Sorcerers’ Collegium, he may yet be defeated.”

  “But not now,” Krispos said.

  “No, Majesty, not now. He screened his encamped army so I could not detect it, he works battle magic so strong and unexpected that it almost broke me when he unleashed it…Majesty, a good many years have passed since I owned myself daunted by any sorcerer, but today Harvas daunts me.”

  Ahead at the barricade, almost all the Videssians were down. They and the crushed soldiers behind them blocked the army’s way forward. Krispos’ glance slid to the slopes of the pass. Who could guess how many more boulders needed only Harvas’ sorcerous command to smash into the imperials, or what other magics Harvas had waiting?

  “We retreat,” Krispos said, tasting gall.

  “Good for you, Your Majesty,” Mammianos said. Startled, Krispos turned in the saddle to stare at him. “Good for you,” the fat general repeated. “Knowing when to cut your losses is a big part of this business. I feared you’d order us to press on regardless, and turn a defeat into a disaster.”

  “It’s already a disaster,” Krispos said.

  Even as the call to retreat rang mournfully through the pass, Mammianos shook his head. “No, Majesty. We’re still in decent order, there’s no panic, and the men will be ready to fight another day—well, maybe another season. But if that he-witch ahead does much more to us, they’ll turn tail every time they see his ruffians, whether he’s with ’em or not.”

  Cold comfort, but better—a bit better—than none. Krispos’ own Halogai closed around him as rear guard while the army withdrew from the pass. If the northerners wanted to slay him and go over to their countrymen, they would never have a better chance. The imperial guardsmen looked back only to shake fists at Videssos’ foes.

  And yet, in a way, the guards were the least of Krispos’ worries. His eyes, like those of so many others with him, kept sliding up the sides of t
he pass while he wondered whether more great stones would smash men and horses to jelly. If Harvas had time to ready stones through the whole length of the pass, disaster great enough to satisfy even Mammianos’ criteria might yet befall the army.

  Somehow, retreat did not become rout. The boulders on the slopes held their places. At last those slopes grew lower and farther apart as the pass opened out into the country below the mountains. “Back to our old campsite?” Mammianos asked.

  “Why not?” Krispos said bitterly. “That way we can pretend today never happened—those of us who are still alive, at any rate.”

  Mammianos tried to console him. “We can’t do these little tricks without losses.”

  “Seems we can’t even do them with losses,” Krispos said, to which the general only grunted by way of reply.

  Any camp is joyless after a defeat. Wounded men scream round winners’ tents, too, but they and their comrades who come through whole know they have accomplished what they set out to do. Losers enjoy no such consolation. Not only have they suffered, they have suffered and failed.

  Failure, Krispos remembered, made Petronas’ army break up. He ordered stronger sentry detachments posted south of the camp than to the north. The officers to whom he gave the command did not remark on it, but nodded knowingly as they saw to carrying it out.

  Krispos walked to the outskirts of the camp, where badly wounded men lay waiting for healer-priests to attend to them. The soldiers not too far gone in their own anguish saluted him and tried to smile, which made him feel worse than he had before. But he made sure he saw all of them and spoke to as many as he could before he went back to his own tent.

  Darkness had fallen by then. Krispos wanted nothing more than to sleep, to forget about the day’s misfortunes, if only for a few hours. But a duty harder even than visiting the wounded lay ahead of him. He’d kept putting off writing to Tanilis of Mavros’ death; he’d hoped to be able to say he had avenged it. Now that hope had vanished—and how much, in any case, would it have mattered to her? Her only son was gone. Krispos inked his pen and sat staring at the blank parchment in front of him. How to begin?