The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  He shook his head. As the priest had said, what were those thrashings and moanings, what were any earthly delights, if they imperiled his soul?

  “Excuse me,” someone said from behind him: the butcher. Phostis turned. So did the Halogai with him. The axes twitched in their hands, as if hungry for blood. The butcher ignored them; he spoke to Phostis as if they were not there: “Friend, you seem to have thought well of what you heard in the temple. That’s just a hunch of mine, mind you—if I’m wrong, you tell me and I’ll go my way.”

  “No, good sir, you’re not wrong.” Phostis wished he’d thought to say “friend,” too. Well, too late now. He continued, “Your priest there preaches well, and has a fiery heart like few I’ve heard. What good is wealth if it hides in a hoard or is wantonly wasted when so many stand in need?”

  “What good is wealth?” the butcher said, and let it go at that. If his eye flicked over the fine robe Phostis wore, they did so too fast for the younger man to notice. The butcher went on, “Maybe you would like to hear more of what the holy sir—his name’s Digenis, by the way—has to say, and hear it in a more private setting?”

  Phostis thought about that. “Maybe I would,” he said at last, for he did want to hear the priest again.

  Had the butcher smiled or shown triumph, his court-sharpened suspicions would have kindled. But the fellow only gave a sober nod. That convinced Phostis of his sincerity, if nothing more. He decided he would indeed try to have that more private audience with Digenis. He’d found this morning that shaking off his bodyguards was anything but easy. Still, there might be ways…

  KATAKOLON STOOD IN THE DOORWAY TO THE STUDY, WAITING until Krispos chanced to look up from the tax register he was examining. Eventually Krispos did. He put down his pen. “What is it, son? Come in if you have something on your mind.”

  By the nervous way in which Katakolon approached his desk, Krispos could make a pretty good guess as to what “it” might be. His youngest son confirmed that guess when he said, “May it please you, Father, I should like to request another advance on my allowance.” His smile, usually so sunny, had the hangdog air it assumed whenever he had to beg money from his father.

  Krispos rolled his eyes. “Another advance? What did you spend it on this time?”

  “An amber-and-emerald bracelet for Nitria,” Katakolon said sheepishly.

  “Who’s Nitria?” Krispos asked. “I thought you were sleeping with Varina these days.”

  “Oh, I still am, Father,” Katakolon assured him. “The other one’s new. That’s why I got her something special.”

  “I see,” Krispos said. He did, too, in a strange sort of way. Katakolon was a lad who generally liked to be liked. With a youth’s enthusiasm and stamina, he also led a love life more complicated than any bureaucratic document. Krispos knew a small measure of relief that he’d managed to remember the name of his son’s current—or, by the sound of things, soon to be current but one—favorite. He sighed. “How much of an allowance do you get every month?”

  “Twenty goldpieces, Father.”

  “That’s right, twenty goldpieces. Do you have any idea how old I was, son, before I had twenty goldpieces to my name, let alone twenty every month of the year? When I was your age, I—”

  “—lived on a farm that grew only nettles, and you ate worms three meals a day,” Katakolon finished for him. Krispos glared. His son said, “You make that same speech every time I ask you for money, Father.”

  “Maybe I do,” Krispos said. Thinking about it, he was suddenly certain he did. That annoyed him; was he getting predictable as he got older? Being predictable could also be dangerous. But he added, “You’d be better off if you hadn’t heard it so many times you’ve committed it to memory.”

  “Yes, Father,” Katakolon said dutifully. “May I please have the advance?”

  Sometimes Krispos gave in, sometimes he didn’t. The cadaster he’d put down so he could talk with his son brought good news: the fisc had gained more revenue than expected from the province just south of the Paristrian Mountains, the province where he’d been born. Gruffly he said, “Very well. I suppose you haven’t managed to bankrupt us yet, boy. But not another copper ahead of time till after Midwinter’s Day, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.” Little by little, Katakolon’s merry expression turned apprehensive. “Midwinter’s Day is still a long way off, Father.” Like anyone who knew Krispos well, the Avtokrator’s third son also knew he was not in the habit of making warnings just to hear himself talk. When he said something, he meant it.

  “Try living within your means,” Krispos suggested. “I didn’t say I was cutting you off without a copper, only that I wouldn’t give you any more money ahead of time till then. The good god willing, I won’t have to do it afterward, either. But you notice I didn’t demand that.”

  “Yes, Father.” Katakolon’s voice tolled like a mourning bell.

  Krispos fought to keep his face straight; he remembered how much he’d hated to be laughed at when he was a youth. “Cheer up, son. By anyone’s standards, twenty goldpieces a month is a lot of money for a young man to get his hands on. You’ll be able to entertain your lady friends in fine style during that little while when you’re not in bed with them.” Katakolon looked so flabbergasted, Krispos had to smile. “I recall how many rounds I could manage back in my own younger days, boy. I can’t match that now, but believe me, I’ve not forgotten.”

  “Whatever you say, Father. I do thank you for the advance, though I’d be even more grateful if you’d not tied that string round its leg.” Katakolon dipped his head and went off to pursue his own affairs—very likely, Krispos thought, in the most literal sense of the word.

  As soon as his son was out of earshot, Krispos did laugh. Young men could not imagine what being older was like; they lacked the experience. Perhaps because of that, they didn’t believe older men retained the slightest notion of what being young meant. But Krispos knew that wasn’t so; his younger self dwelt within him yet, covered over with years but still emphatically there.

  He wasn’t always proud of the young man he had been. He’d done a lot of foolish things, as young men will. It wasn’t because he’d been stupid; he’d just been callow. If he’d known then what he knew now…He laughed again, this time at himself. Graybeards had been singing that song since the world began.

  He went back to his desk and finished working through the tax register. He wrote I have read and approved—Krispos in scarlet ink at the bottom of the parchment. Then, without so much as looking at the report that lay beneath it, he got up from the desk, stretched, and walked out into the hallway.

  When he got near the entrance to the imperial residence, he almost bumped into Barsymes, who was coming out of the small audience chamber there. The vestiarios’ eyes widened slightly. “I’d expected you would still be hard at the morning’s assemblage of documents, Your Majesty.”

  “To the ice with the morning’s assemblage of documents, Barsymes,” Krispos declared. “I’m going fishing.”

  “Very well, Your Majesty. I shall set the preparations in train directly.”

  “Thank you, esteemed sir,” Krispos said. Even something as simple as a trip to the nearest pier was not free from ceremony for an Avtokrator of the Videssians. The requisite twelve parasol-bearers had to be rounded up; the Haloga captain had to be alerted so he could provide the even more requisite squadron of bodyguards.

  Krispos endured the wait with the patience that years of waiting had taught him. He chose several flexible cane rods, each a little taller than he was, from a rack in a storage room, and a rather greater number of similar lengths of horsehair line. In the tackle box beside the rack of fishing poles were a good many barbed hooks of bronze. He preferred that metal to iron; though softer, it needed less care after being dunked in salt water.

  Off in the kitchens, a servant would be catching him cockroaches for bait. He’d done it himself once, but only once; it scandalized p
eople worse than any of Anthimos’ ingenious perversions had ever managed to do.

  “All is in readiness, Your Majesty,” Barsymes announced after a delay shorter than Krispos had expected. He held out to the Emperor an elaborately chased brass box from Makuran. Krispos accepted it with a grave nod. Only tiny skittering noises revealed that inside the elegant artifact were frantic brown-black bugs about the size of the last joint of his thumb.

  The palace compound boasted several piers at widely spaced points along the sea wall; Krispos sometimes wondered if they’d been built to give an overthrown Avtokrator the best chance for escape by sea. As he and his retinue paraded toward the one closest to the imperial residence, though, he stopped worrying about blows against the state or against his person. When he stepped down into the little rowboat tied there, he was as nearly free as an Emperor could be.

  Oh, true, a couple of Halogai got into another rowboat and followed him as he rowed out into the lightly choppy waters of the Cattle-Crossing. Their strokes were strong and sure; scores of narrow inlets pierced the rocky soil of Halogaland, so its sons naturally took to the ocean.

  And true, a light war galley would also put to sea, in case conspirators mounted an attack on the Avtokrator too deadly for a pair of northern men to withstand. But the galley stayed a good quarter mile from Krispos’ rowboat, and even the houndlike Halogai let him separate himself from them by close to a furlong. He could imagine he sat alone on the waves.

  In his younger days, he had never thought of fishing as a sport he might favor. It was something he occasionally did to help feed himself when he had the time. Now, though, it gave him the chance to escape not only from his duties but also from his servitors, something he simply could not do on land.

  Being the man he was, he’d also become a skillful fisherman over the years; whatever he did, for whatever reasons, he tried to do well. He tied a cork float to his line to keep his hook at the depth he wanted it. To that hook he wired several little pieces of lead from the tackle box to help it have the semblance of natural motion in the water. Then he opened the bait box Barsymes had given him, seized a roach between thumb and forefinger, and impaled it on the hook’s barbed tip.

  While he was catching the roach, a couple of others leapt out of box and scuttled around the bottom of the rowboat. For the moment, he ignored them. If he needed them later, he’d get them. They weren’t going anywhere far.

  He tossed the line over the side. The float bobbed in the green-blue water. Krispos sat holding the rod and let his thoughts drift freely. Sea mist softened the outline of the far shore of the Cattle-Crossing, but he could still make out the taller buildings of the suburb known simply as Across.

  He turned his head. Behind him, Videssos the city bulked enormous. Past the Grand Courtroom and the Hall of the Nineteen Couches stood the great mass of the High Temple. It dominated the capital’s skyline from every angle. Also leaping above the rooftops of other buildings was the red granite shaft of the Milestone at the edge of the plaza of Palamas, from which all distances in the Empire were reckoned.

  Sunlight sparked from the gilded domes that topped the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of temples to Phos in the city. Krispos thought back to his own first glimpse of the imperial capital, and the globes flashing like suns themselves under the good god’s sun.

  The Cattle-Crossing was full of ships: lean war galleys like the one that watched him; trading ships full of grain or building stone or cargoes more diverse and expensive; little fishing boats whose crews scoured the sea not for sport but for survival. Watching them pull their nets up over the side, Krispos wondered whether they might not work harder even than farmers, a question that had never crossed his mind about any other trade.

  His float suddenly jerked under the water. He yanked up the rod and pulled in the line. A shimmering blue flying fish twisted at the end of it. He smiled, grabbed it, and tossed it into the bottom of the boat. It wasn’t very big, but it would be tasty. Maybe his cook could make it stretch in a stew—or maybe he’d catch another one.

  He foraged in the bait box, grabbed another cockroach, and skewered it on the hook to replace the one that had been the luckless flying fish’s last meal. The roach’s little legs still flailed as it sank beneath the sea.

  After that, Krispos spent a good stretch of time staring at the float and waiting for something to happen. Fishing was like that sometimes. He had sometimes thought about asking Zaidas if sorcery could help the business along, but always decided not to. Catching fish was only part of the reason he came out here in the little boat. The other part, the bigger part, was to get away from everyone around him. Making himself a more efficient fisherman might net him more fish, but it would cost him some of the precious time he had to himself.

  Besides, if fishing magic were possible, the horny-handed, sun-browned sailors who made their living from their catch would surely employ it. No, maybe not: it might be feasible, but too expensive to make it worthwhile for anyone not already rich to afford it. Zaidas would know. Maybe he would ask him. And maybe he wouldn’t. Now that he thought about it, he probably wouldn’t.

  His float disappeared again. When he tried to pull up the rod this time, it bent like a bow. He pulled once more, and once more the fish fought back. He walked his hands up to the tip of the rod, then pulled in the line hand over hand. “By the good god, here’s a treat indeed!” he exclaimed when he saw the fat red mullet writhing on his hook.

  He snatched up a net and slid it up over the fish from below. The mullet was as large as his forearm, and meaty enough to feed several. Had he fished for a living, he could have sold it in the plaza of Palamas for a fine price: Videssos the city’s gourmets reckoned it their favorite, even to the point of nicknaming it the emperor of fishes.

  Though called red, the mullet had been brownish with yellow stripes when he took it from the sea. It turned a crimson almost the color of his boots, however, as it struggled for its life, then slowly began to fade toward gray.

  Mullets were famous for their spectacular color changes. Krispos remembered one of Anthimos’ revels, where his predecessor had ordered several of them slowly boiled alive in a large glass vessel so the feasters could appreciate their shifting hues as they cooked. He’d watched with as much interest as anyone else; only looking back on it did it seem cruel.

  Perhaps a sauce with garlic-flavored egg whites would do this one justice, he thought; even the head of a mullet pickled in brine was esteemed a delicacy. He’d have to talk with the cook when he went back to the imperial residence.

  He gently set the prized catch in the bottom of the rowboat, treating it with far more care than he had the flying fish. If he’d used fishing as anything but an excuse to get away from the palaces, he would have rowed back to the pier with as much celerity as his arms could give him. Instead, he caught another cockroach, rebaited the hook, and dropped the line into the water again.

  He quickly made another catch, but it was only an ugly, tasteless croaker. He pulled the barbed hook out of its mouth and tossed it back into the water, then opened the bait box for another bug.

  After that, he sat and sat for a long time, waiting for something to happen and accepting with almost trancelike calm the nothing that fate was giving him. The boat shifted gently in the waves. His stomach had been a bit uncertain the first few times he went to sea. With greater familiarity, the motion had come to soothe him; it was as if he sat in a chair that not only rocked but also swiveled. Of course, he did not take the rowboat out on stormy days, either.

  “Your Majesty!” The call across the water snapped Krispos out of his reverie. He looked back toward the dock from which he’d rowed out, expecting to see someone standing there with a megaphone. Instead, a rowboat was approaching his own as fast as the man in it could ply the blades. He wondered how long the fellow had been hailing him before he noticed.

  The Halogai, who had been fishing, too, grabbed for their oars and moved to block the newcomer’s path. He paused in his exerti
on long enough to snatch up a sealed roll of parchment and wave it in their direction. After that, Krispos’ bodyguards let him come on, but rowed beside him to make sure he could try nothing untoward if his precious message proved a ruse.

  Proskynesis in a rowboat was impractical; the fellow with the parchment contented himself with dipping his head to Krispos. Panting, he said, “May it please Your Majesty, I bring a dispatch just arrived from the environs of Pityos.” He handed Krispos the parchment across the palm’s breadth of water that separated their boats.

  As often happened, Krispos had the bad feeling his Majesty was not going to be pleased. Scrawled on the outside of the parchment in a hasty hand was For Krispos Avtokrator—vital that he read the instant received. No wonder the messenger had leapt into a rowboat, then.

  Krispos flicked off the wax seal with his thumbnail, then used a scaling knife from the tackle box to slice through the ribbon that held the parchment closed. When he unrolled it, he found the message inside written in the same hand as the warning of urgency on the outer surface. It was also to the point:

  Troop Leader Gainas to Krispos Avtokrator: Greetings. We were attacked by Thanasioi two days’ march southeast of Pityos. I grieve to report to Your Majesty that most of the forces sent there not only yielded themselves up to the heretics and rebels but indeed took their cause against the rest. The leader of this action was the merarch Livanios, the chief aide to our commander Briso.

  Because of this, those loyal to you were utterly defeated; the priests we were escorting to Pityos were captured and most piteously massacred. May the good god redeem their souls. Forgive one of my lowly rank for writing to you directly, Your Majesty, but I fear I am the senior loyal officer left alive. The Thanasioi must now be reckoned to control the whole of this province. Skotos surely awaits them in the world to come.