The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  Krispos hesitated before he answered; Tribo’s “compliment” had teeth in it. Because Videssos had once ruled all the civilized world east of Makuran, universality was a cornerstone of its dealings with other states and of its theology. To deny that universality would give Krispos’ nobles an excuse to mutter among themselves. He wanted them to have no such excuses.

  At last he said, “Of course there should be only one faith; how else may a realm count on its folk remaining loyal to it? But since we have not met that ideal in Videssos, we would be in a poor position to pursue it elsewhere. Besides, eminent envoy, if you accuse us of introducing a new heresy into Khatrish, you can hardly at the same time accuse us of trying to force your people into orthodoxy.”

  Tribo’s mouth twisted into a smile that lifted only one corner of it. “The first argument has some weight, Your Majesty. As for the second one, I’d like it better in a school of logic than I do in the world. You could well hope to throw us into such religious strife that your folk might enter Khatrish and be acclaimed as rescuers.”

  “Your master Nobad son of Gumush is well served in you, eminent envoy,” Krispos said. “You see more facets in a matter than a jeweler could carve.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty!” Tribo actually beamed. “Coming from a man with twenty-two years on the throne of Videssos, there’s praise indeed. I shall convey to his mighty Highness that Videssos is itself plagued by these Thanasioi and not responsible for visiting them upon my country.”

  “I hope you do, for that is the truth.”

  “Your Majesty.” Tribo prostrated himself once more, then rose and backed away from the throne until he had gone far enough to turn around without offending the Avtokrator of the Videssians. As far as Krispos was concerned, the ambassador could simply have turned his back and walked away, but the imperial dignity did not permit such ordinary behavior in his presence. He sometimes thought of his office as having a personality of its own, and a stuffy one at that.

  Before he left the Grand Courtroom, he reminded himself to have the gear train behind his throne oiled.

  “GOOD MORNING, YOUR MAJESTY.” WITH A MOCKING SMILE ON his face, Evripos made as if to perform a proskynesis right in the middle of the corridor.

  “By the good god, little brother, let it be,” Phostis said wearily. “You’re just as much—and just as little—Avtokrator as I am.

  “That’s true, for now. But I’ll forever be just as little Avtokrator as you are, where after a while I won’t be just as much. Do you expect me to be happy about that, just because you were born first? I’m sorry, Your Majesty”—the scorn Evripos put into the title was withering—“but you ask too much.”

  Phostis wished he could punch his brother in the face, as he had when they were boys. But Evripos was his little brother now only in age; he had most of a palm on Phostis in height and was thicker through the shoulders to boot. These days, he’d be the one to do most of the punching in a fight.

  “I can’t help being eldest, any more than you can help being born second,” Phostis said. “Only one of us will be able to rule when the time comes; that’s just the way things are. But who better than my brothers to—”

  “—be your lapdogs,” Evripos broke in, looking down his long nose at Phostis. Like Phostis, he had his mother’s distinctive eyes, but the rest of his features were those of Krispos. Phostis also suspected Evripos had more of their father’s driving ambition than he himself had…or perhaps it was simply that Evripos was in a position where ambition stood out more. If events continued in their expected course, Phostis would be the Avtokrator of the Videssians. Evripos wanted the job, but was unlikely to get it by any legitimate means.

  Phostis said, “Little brother, you and Katakolon can be my mainstays on the throne. Better to have family aid a man than outsiders—safer, too.” If I can trust you, he added to himself.

  “So you say now,” Evripos retorted. “But I’ve had to read the historians just as you have. Once one son becomes Emperor, what’s left for the others? Nothing, maybe less. They only show up in the books because they’ve raised a rebellion or else because they get a name for debauchery.”

  “Who gets a name for debauchery?” Katakolon asked as he came down the corridor of the imperial residence. He grinned at his two grim-faced brothers. “Me, I hope.”

  “You’re well on your way to it, that’s certain,” Phostis told him. The remark should have been cutting; instead, it came out with an unmistakable ring of envy. Katakolon’s grin got wider.

  Phostis felt like punching him, too, but he was Evripos’ size or bigger. Like Evripos, he favored Krispos in looks. Of the three of them, though, he had the sunny disposition. Being the heir set heavy responsibilities on Phostis. Evripos saw only Phostis standing between him and what he wanted. Both older brothers had better claims to the throne than Katakolon, who didn’t seem interested in sitting on it, anyhow. All he wanted was to enjoy himself, which he did.

  Evripos said, “His imperial Majesty here is deigning to parcel out to us our subordinate duties once he becomes senior Avtokrator.”

  “Well, why not?” Katakolon said. “That’s how it’s going to be, unless Father ties him in a weighted sack and flings him into the Cattle-Crossing. Father might, too, the way they go at each other.”

  Had Evripos said that, Phostis probably would have hit him. From Katakolon, it was just so many words. Not only was the youngest brother slow to take offense, he had trouble giving it, too.

  Katakolon went on, “I know one of the subordinate duties I’d like, come the day: supervising the treasury subbureau that collects taxes from within the city walls.”

  “By the good god, why?” Evripos said, beating Phostis to the punch. “Isn’t that rather too much like work for your taste?”

  “That subbureau of the treasury collects tax receipts from and generally has charge of the city’s brothels.” Katakolon licked his lips. “I’m certain any Avtokrator would appreciate the careful inspection I’d give them.”

  For once, Phostis and Evripos looked equally disgusted. It wasn’t that Evripos failed to delight in venery; he was at least as bold a man of his lance as Katakolon. But Evripos did what he did without chortling about it to all and sundry afterward. Phostis suspected he was disgusted with Katakolon more for revealing a potential vulnerability than for his choice of supervisory position.

  Phostis said, “If we don’t stick together, brothers, there are plenty in the city who would turn us against one another, for their own benefit rather than ours.”

  “I’m too busy with my own tool to become anyone else’s,” Katakolon declared, at which Phostis threw up his hands and stalked away.

  He thought about going to the High Temple to ask Phos to grant his brothers some common sense, but decided not to. After Oxeites’ hypocritical sermon, the High Temple, an edifice in which he had taken pride like almost every other citizen of Videssos the city and indeed of the Videssian Empire, now seemed only a repository for mountains of gold that could have been better spent in countless other ways. He could hate the ecumenical patriarch for that alone, for destroying the beauty and grandeur of the Temple in his mind.

  As he stamped out of the imperial residence, a pair of Halogai from the squadron at the entrance attached themselves to him. He didn’t want them, but knew the futility of ordering them back to their post—they would just answer, in their slow, serious northern voices, that he was their post.

  Instead, he tried to shake them off. They were, after all, encumbered with mail shirts, helms, and two-handed axes. For a little while, he thought he might succeed; sweat poured down their faces as they sped up to match his own quick walk, and their fair skins grew pink with exertion. But they were warriors, in fine fettle, and refused to wilt in heat worse than any for which their northern home had prepared them. They clung to him like limpets.

  He slowed down as he reached the borders of the palace compound and started across the crowded plaza of Palamas. He thought of losing himse
lf among the swarms of people there, but, before he could transform thought to deed, the Halogai moved up on either side of him and made a break impossible.

  He was even glad of their presence as he traversed the square. Their broad, mailed shoulders and forbidding expressions helped clear a path through the hucksters, soldiers, housewives, scribes, whores, artists, priests, and folk of every other sort who used the plaza as a place wherein to sell, to buy, to gossip, to cheat, to proclaim, or simply to gawp.

  Once Phostis got to the far side of the plaza of Palamas, he headed east along Middle Street without even thinking about it. He walked past the red granite pile of the government office building before he consciously realized what he’d done: a few more blocks, a left turn, and his feet would have taken him to the High Temple even though the rest of him didn’t want to go there.

  He glared down at his red boots, as if wondering if his brothers had somehow suborned them. With slow deliberation, he turned right rather than left at the next corner. He made a few more turns at random, leaving behind the familiar main street of Videssos the city for whatever its interior might bring him.

  The Halogai muttered back and forth in their own language. Phostis could guess what they were saying: something to the effect that two guards might not be enough to keep him out of trouble in this part of town. He pushed ahead anyhow, reasoning that although bad things could happen, odds were they wouldn’t.

  Away from Middle Street and a few other thoroughfares, Videssos the city’s streets—lanes might have been a better word, or even alleys—forgot whatever they might have known about the idea of a straight line. The narrow little ways were made to seem narrower still because the upper stories of buildings extended out over the cobblestones toward each other. The city had laws regulating how close together they could come, but if any inspector had been through this section lately, he’d been bribed to look up with a blind eye toward the scrawny strip of blue that showed between balconies.

  People on the streets gave Phostis curious looks as he walked along: it was not a district in which nobles in fine robes commonly appeared. No one bothered him, though; evidently two big Haloga guards were enough. A barmaid-pretty girl of about his own age stopped and smiled at him. She drew up one hand to toy with her hair and incidentally show off her breasts to the best advantage. When he didn’t pause, she gave him the two-fingered street gesture that implied he was effeminate.

  The shops in this part of town kept their doors closed. When a customer opened one, Phostis saw its timbers were thick enough to grace a citadel. But for their doors, probably just as thick, houses presented blank fronts of stucco or brick to the street. Though that was normal in Videssos the city, most dwellings being built around courtyards, here it seemed as if they were making a point of concealing whatever they had.

  Phostis was on the point of trying to make his way back to Middle Street and his own part of town when he came upon men in ragged cloaks and worker’s tunics and women in cheap, faded dresses filing into a building that at first looked no more prepossessing than any other hereabouts. But on its roof was a wooden tower topped with a globe whose gilding had seen better days: this, too, was a temple to Phos, though as different from the High Temple as could be imagined.

  He smiled and made for the entrance. He’d wanted to pray when he left the palaces, but hadn’t been able to stomach listening to Oxeites celebrate the liturgy again. Maybe the good god had guided his footsteps hither.

  The ordinary people going in to pray didn’t seem to think Phos had anything to do with it. The stares they gave Phostis weren’t curious; they were downright hostile. A man wearing the bloodstained leather apron of a butcher said, “Here, friend, don’t you think you’d be more content praying somewheres else?”

  “Somewhere fancy, like you are?” a woman added. She didn’t sound admiring; to her the word was one of reproach.

  Some of the shabby band of worshipers carried knives on their belts. In a run-down part of the city like this, snatching up paving stones to hurl would be the work of a moment. The Halogai realized that before Phostis did, and moved to put themselves between him and what could become a mob.

  “Wait,” he said. Neither northerner even turned to look at him. Keeping their eyes on the crowd in front of the little temple, they wordlessly shook their heads. He was barely tall enough to peer at the people over their armored shoulders. Pitching his voice to carry to the Videssians, he declared, “I’ve had my fill of worshiping Phos at fancy temples. How can we hope the good god will hear us if we talk about helping the poor in a building richer than even the Avtokrator enjoys?”

  No one had noticed his red boots. Behind the Halogai, they would be all but invisible. Like the people in the streets, the congregants must have taken him for merely a noble out slumming. His words made the city folk pause and murmur among themselves.

  After a small pause, the butcher said, “You really mean that, friend?”

  “I do,” Phostis answered loudly. “By the lord with the great and good mind, I swear it.”

  Either his words or his tone must have carried conviction, for the band of worshipers stopped scowling and began to beam. The butcher, who seemed to be their spokesman, said, “Friend, if you do mean that, you can hear what our priest, the good god bless him, has to say. We don’t even ask that you keep quiet about it afterward, for it’s sound doctrine. Am I right, my friends?”

  Everyone around him nodded. Phostis wondered whether this congregation employed friend as a general term or if it was just the man’s way of speaking. He rather hoped the former was true. The usage might be unusual among Phos’ followers, but he liked its spirit.

  Still grumbling, the Halogai grudgingly let him go into the temple, though one preceded him and the other followed close behind. A few icons with images of Phos hung on the roughly plastered walls; otherwise, the place was bare of ornament. The altar behind which the priest stood was of carven pine. His blue robe, of the plainest wool, lacked even a cloth-of-gold circle above his heart to symbolize Phos’ sun.

  The good god’s creed and liturgy, though, remained the same regardless of setting. Phostis followed this priest as easily as he had the ecumenical patriarch. The only difference was that this ecclesiastic spoke with an upcountry accent even stronger than that of Krispos, who had worked hard to shed his peasant intonation. The priest came from the west, Phostis judged, not from the north like his father.

  When the required prayers were over, the priest surveyed his congregants. “I rejoice that the lord with the great and good mind has brought you back to me once more, friends,” he said. His eyes fixed on Phostis and the Haloga guards as he uttered that last word, as if he wondered whether they deserved to come under it.

  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he continued: “Friends, we have not been cursed with much in the way of material abundance.” Again he gave Phostis a measuring stare. “I praise the lord with the great and good mind for that, for we have not much to give away before we come to be judged in front of his holy throne.”

  Phostis blinked; this was not the sort of theological reasoning he was used to hearing. This priest took off from the point at which Oxeites had halted. But he, unlike the patriarch, lacked hypocrisy. He was plainly as poor as his temple and his congregation. That in and of itself inclined Phostis to take him seriously.

  He went on, “How can we hope to rise to the heavens while weighted down with gold in our belt pouches? I will not say it cannot be, friends, but I say that few of the rich live lives sufficiently saintly to rise above the dross they value more than their souls.”

  “That’s right, holy sir!” a woman exclaimed. Someone else, a man this time, added, “Tell the truth!”

  The priest picked that up and set it into his sermon as neatly as a mason taking a brick from a new pile. “Tell the truth I shall, friends. The truth is that everything the foolish rich run after is but a snare from Skotos, a lure to drag them down to his eternal ice. If Phos is the patron of our
souls, as we know him to be, then how can material things be his concern? The answer is simple, friends: they cannot. The material world is Skotos’ plaything. Rejoice if you have but little share therein; would it were true for all of us. The greatest service we can render to one who knows not this truth is to deprive him of that which ties him to Skotos, thereby liberating his soul to contemplate the higher good.”

  “Yes,” a woman cried, her voice high and breathy, as if in ecstasy. “Oh, yes!”

  The butcher who had spoken to Phostis still sounded solid and matter-of-fact. “I pray that you guide us in our renunciation of the material, holy sir.”

  “Let your own knowledge of moving toward Phos’ holy light be your guide, friend,” the priest answered. “What you renounce is yours only in this world at best. Will you risk an eternity in Skotos’ ice for its sake? Only a fool would act so.”

  “We’re no fools,” the butcher said. “We know—” He broke off to give Phostis yet another measuring stare; by this time, Phostis was sick of them. Whatever he had been about to say, he reconsidered, starting again after a barely noticeable pause: “We know what we know, by the good god.”

  The rest of the people in the shabby temple knew whatever it was the butcher knew. They called out in agreement, some loudly, some softly, all with more belief and piety in their voices than Phostis had ever heard from the prominent folk who most often prayed in the High Temple. His brief anger at being excluded from whatever they knew soon faded. He wished he could find something to believe in with as much force as these people gave to their faith.

  The priest raised his hands to the heavens, then spat between his feet in ritual rejection of Skotos. He led the worshipers in Phos’ creed one last time, then announced the end of the liturgy. As Phostis turned and left the temple, once more bracketed fore and aft by his bodyguards, he felt a sense of loss and regret on returning to the mundane world that he’d never known when departing from the superficially more awesome setting of the High Temple. An impious comparison crossed his mind: it was almost as if he were returning to himself after the piercing pleasure of the act of love.