The Tale of Krispos

by Harry Turtledove

  “I should thank you, Your Majesty, for not ignoring me or casting me out of the palaces or putting me in a sack and throwing me into the Cattle-Crossing because my belly made me a nuisance to you,” Drina said.

  “You shame me,” Krispos said. He saw she didn’t understand, and felt bound to explain: “When I’m thanked for not being a monster, it tells me I’ve not been all the man I might be.”

  “Who is?” she said. “And you’re the Avtokrator. All the things you keep in your head, Your Majesty—I’d go mad if I tried it for a day. I was just glad you saw fit to remember me at all, and do what you can for me.”

  Krispos pondered that. An Avtokrator could do what he chose—he needed to look no further than Anthimos’ antics to be reminded of that. The power made responsibility hard to remember. Seen from that viewpoint, maybe he wasn’t doing so badly after all.

  “Thank you,” he said to Drina again, this time with no hesitation at all.

  A BOYS’ CHOIR SANG HYMNS OF THANKSGIVING. THE SWEET, almost unearthly notes came echoing back from the dome of the High Temple, filling the worship area below with joyous sound.

  Phostis, however, listened without joy. He knew he was no Thanasiot. All the same, the countless wealth lavished on the High Temple still struck him as excessive. And when Oxeites lifted up his hands to beseech Phos’ favor, all Phostis could think of was the ecumenical patriarch’s cloth-of-gold sleeves and the pearls and precious gems mounted on them.

  Only because of the peace he’d made with Krispos had he come here. He recognized that celebrating his safe return to Videssos the city at the most holy shrine of the Empire’s faith was politically and theologically valuable, so he endured it. That did not mean he liked it.

  Beside him, though, awe turned Olyvria’s face almost into that of a stranger. Her eyes flew like butterflies, landing now here, now there, marveling at the patriarch’s regalia, at the moss-agate and marble columns, at the altar, at the rich woods of the pews, and most of all, inevitably, at the mosaic image of Phos, stern in judgment, that looked down on his worshipers from the dome.

  “It’s so marvelous,” she whispered to Phostis for the third time since the service began. “Every city in the provinces says its main temple is modeled after this one. What none of them says is that all their models are toys.”

  Phostis grunted softly, back in his throat. What she found wondrous was cloying to him. Then, of themselves, his eyes too went up to the dome. No man could be easy meeting the gaze of that Phos: the image seemed to see inside his head, to know and note every stain on his soul. Even Thanasios would have quailed under that inspection. For the sake of the image in the dome, Phostis forgave the rest of the temple.

  The choirmaster brought down his hands. The boys fell silent. Their blue silk robes shimmered in the lamplight as the echoes of their music slowly faded. Oxeites recited Phos’ creed. The notables who filled the temple joined him at prayer. Those echoes also reverberated from the dome.

  The patriarch said, “Not only do we seek thy blessing, Phos, we also humbly send up to thee our thanks for returning to us Phostis son of Krispos, heir to the throne of Videssos, and granting him thine aid through all the troubles he has so bravely endured.”

  “He’s never been humble in his life, surely not since he donned the blue boots,” Phostis murmured to Olyvria.

  “Hush,” she murmured back; the Temple had her in its spell.

  Oxeites went on, “Surely, lord with the great and good mind, thou also viewest with favor the ending of the Empire’s trial of heresy, and the way in which its passing was symbolized by the recent union of the young Majesty and his lovely bride.”

  A spattering of applause rose from the assembled worshipers, vigorously led by Krispos. Phostis was convinced Oxeites would not know a symbol if it reached up and yanked him by the beard; he suspected the Avtokrator of putting words in his patriarch’s mouth.

  “We thank thee, Phos, for thy blessings of peace and prosperity, and once more for the restoration of the young Majesty to the bosom of his family and to Videssos the city,” Oxeites said in ringing tones.

  The choir burst into song again. When the hymn was finished, the patriarch dismissed the congregation: the thanksgiving service was not a full and formal liturgy. Phostis blinked against the late summer sun as he walked down the broad, wide stairs outside the High Temple. Katakolon poked him in the ribs and said, “The only bosom you care about in your family is Olyvria’s.”

  “By the good god, you’re shameless,” Phostis said. He couldn’t help laughing, even so. Because Katakolon had no malice in him, he could get away with outrages that would have landed either of his brothers in trouble.

  In the courtyard outside the High Temple, people of rank insufficient to get them into the thanksgiving service cheered as Phostis came down from the steps and walked over to his horse. He waved to them, all the while wondering how many had shouted for the gleaming path not long before.

  The Haloga guard who held the horse’s head said, “You talk to your god only a little while today.” He sounded approving, or at least relieved.

  Phostis handed Olyvria up onto her mount, then swung into the saddle himself. The Halogai formed up around the imperial party for the return to the palaces. Olyvria rode at Phostis’ left. To his right was Evripos. His older younger brother curled his lip and said, “You’re back. Hurrah.” Then he looked straight ahead and seemed to concentrate solely on his horsemanship.

  “Wait a minute,” Phostis said harshly. “I’m sick of cracks like that from you. If you wanted me to be gone and stay gone, you had your chance to do something about it.”

  “I told you then, I don’t have that kind of butchery in me,” Evripos answered.

  “Well then, quit talking to me as if you wish you did.”

  That made Evripos look his way again, though still without anything that could be called friendliness. “Brother of mine, just because I won’t shed blood of my blood, that doesn’t mean I want to clasp you to my bosom, if I can steal the patriarch’s phrase.”

  “That’s not enough,” Phostis said.

  “It’s all I care to make it,” Evripos answered.

  “It’s not enough, I tell you,” Phostis said, which succeeded in gaining Evripos’ undivided attention. Phostis went on, “One of these days, if I live, I’m going to wear the red boots. Unless Olyvria and I have a son of our own, you’ll be next in line for them. Even if we do, he’d be small for a long time. The day may come when you decide blood doesn’t matter, or maybe you’ll think you can just shave my head and pack me off to a monastery: you’d get the throne and salve your tender conscience at the same time.”

  Evripos scowled. “I wouldn’t do that. As you said, I had my chance.”

  “You wouldn’t do it now,” Phostis returned. “What about ten years from now, or twenty, when you feel you can’t stand being second in line for another heartbeat? Or what happens if I decide I can’t trust you to stay in your proper place? I might strike first, little brother. Did you ever think of that?”

  Evripos was good at using his face to mask his thoughts. But Phostis had watched him all his life, and saw he’d succeeded in surprising him. The surprise faded quickly. Evripos studied Phostis as closely as he was studied in turn. Slowly, he said, “You’ve changed.” It sounded like an accusation.

  “Have I, now?” Phostis tried to keep anything but the words themselves from his voice.

  “Aye, you have.” It was accusation. “Before you got kidnapped, you didn’t have the slightest notion what you were for, what you wanted. You knew what you were against—”

  “Anything that had to do with Father,” Phostis interrupted.

  “Just so,” Evripos agreed with a thin smile. “But being against is easy. Finding, knowing, what you truly do want is harder.”

  “You know what you want,” Olyvria put in.

  “Of course I do,” Evripos said. The red boots hung unspoken in the air. “But it looks like I can’t have
that. And now that Phostis knows what he wants, too, and what it means to him, it makes him ever so much more dangerous to me than he was before.”

  “So it does,” Phostis said. “You can do one of two things about it, as far as I can see: you can try to take me out, which you say you don’t want to do, or you can work with me. We spoke of that before I got kidnapped; maybe you remember. You scoffed at me then. Do you sing a different tune now? The second man in all the Empire can find or make a great part for himself.”

  “But it’s not the first part,” Evripos said.

  “I know that’s what you want,” Phostis answered, saying it for his brother. “If you look one way, you see one person ahead of you. But if you look in the other direction, you see everyone else behind. Isn’t that enough?”

  Enough to make Evripos thoughtful, at any rate. When he answered, “It’s not what I want,” the words lacked the hostility with which he’d spoken before.

  Krispos rode ahead of the younger members of the imperial family. As he clattered down the cobblestones in front of the government office building where Digenis had been confined, a man strolling along the sidewalk sang out, “Phos bless you, Your Majesty!” Krispos sent him a wave and kept on riding.

  “That’s what I want.” Now Evripos’ voice ached with envy. “Who’s going to cheer a general or a minister? It’s the Avtokrator who gets the glory, by the good god.”

  “He gets the blame, too,” Phostis pointed out. “If I could, I’d give you all the glory, Evripos; for all I care, it can go straight to the ice. But there’s more to running the Empire than having people cheer you in the streets. I didn’t take it seriously before I got snatched, but my eyes have been opened since then.”

  He wondered if that would mean anything to his brother. It seemed to, for Evripos said, “So have mine. Don’t forget, I was running Videssos the city while Father went on campaign. Even without the riots, I’ll not deny that was a great bloody lot of work. All jots and tittles and parchments that didn’t mean anything till you’d read them five times, and sometimes not then.”

  Phostis nodded. He often wondered if he wanted to walk in Krispos’ footsteps and pore over documents into the middle of the night. That, surely, was why the Empire of Videssos had developed so large and thorough a bureaucracy over the centuries: to keep the Avtokrator from having to shoulder such burdens.

  As if Krispos had spoken aloud, Phostis heard his opinion of that: Aye, and if you let the pen-pushers and seal-stampers run affairs without checking up on them, how do you know when they’re bungling things or cheating you? The good god knows we need them, and he also knows they need someone looking over them. Anthimos almost brought the Empire to ruin because he wouldn’t attend to his ruling.

  “I wouldn’t be Anthimos,” Phostis protested, just as if Krispos had spoken out loud. Olyvria, Evripos, and Katakolon all gave him curious looks. He felt his cheeks heat.

  Evripos said, “Well, I wouldn’t, either. If I tried to live that life after Father died, I expect he’d climb out of the tomb and wring my neck with bony fingers.” He dropped his voice and sent a nervous glance up ahead toward Krispos; Phostis guessed he was only half joking.

  “Me, I’m just as glad I’m not likely to wear the red boots,” Katakolon said. “I like a good carouse now and then; it keeps you from going stale.”

  “A good carouse now and then is one thing,” Phostis said. “From all the tales, though, Anthimos never stopped, or even slowed down.”

  “A short life but a merry one,” Katakolon said, grinning.

  “You let Father hear that from you and your life may be short, but it won’t be merry,” Phostis answered. “He’s not what you’d call fond of Anthimos’ memory.”

  Katakolon looked forward again; he did not want to rouse Krispos’ wrath. Phostis suddenly grasped another reason why Krispos so despised the predecessor whose throne and wife he’d taken: no doubt he’d wondered all the years since Anthimos had left behind a cuckoo’s egg for him to raise as his own.

  And yet, of the three young men, Phostis was probably most like Krispos in character, if perhaps more inclined to reflection and less to action. Evripos was devious in a different way, and his resentment that he hadn’t been born first left him sour. And Katakolon—Katakolon had a blithe disregard for consequences that set him apart from both his brothers.

  Without warning, Evripos said, “You’ll give me room to make something for myself, make something of myself, when the red boots go on your feet?”

  “I’ve said so all along,” Phostis answered. “Would an oath make you happier?”

  “Nothing along those lines would truly make me happy,” Evripos said. “But one of the things I’ve seen is that sometimes there’s nothing to be done about the way things are…or nothing that isn’t worse, anyhow. Let it be as you say, brother of mine; I’ll serve you, and do my best to recall that everyone else serves me as well as you.”

  The two of them solemnly clasped hands. Olyvria exclaimed in delight; even Katakolon looked unwontedly sober. Evripos’ palm was warm in Phostis’. By her expression, Olyvria thought all the troubles between them were over. Phostis wished he thought the same. As far as he could see, he and Evripos would be watching each other for the rest of their lives, no matter what promises they made each other. That, too, came with being part of the imperial family.

  Had Evripos said something like Good to have that settled once and for all, Phostis would have suspected him more, not less. As it was, his younger brother just flicked him a glance to see how seriously he took the gesture of reconciliation. For a moment, their eyes met. They both smiled, again for a moment only. They might not trust each other, but they understood each other.

  Along with the rest of the imperial party, they rode through the plaza of Palamas and into the palace quarter. After the raucous bustle of the rest of the city, quiet enfolded them there like a cloak. Phostis felt he was coming home. That had special meaning to him after what he’d gone through the past few months.

  He’d always used his bedchamber in the imperial residence as a refuge from Krispos. Now that Olyvria shared it with him, he sometimes thought he never wanted to come out again. It wasn’t that they spent all their time making love, delightful though that was. But he’d also found in her somebody he liked talking with more than anyone else he’d ever known.

  He let himself tip over backward onto the bed like a falling tree. The thick goose down of the mattress absorbed his weight; it was like falling into a warm, dry snowbank. With him sprawled across the middle of the bed, Olyvria sat at its foot. She said, “All of this—” She waved to show she meant not just the room, not just the palace, but also the service and the procession through the streets of the city. “—still feels unreal to me.”

  “You’ll have the rest of your days to get used to it,” Phostis answered. “A lot of it is foolish and boring to go through; even Father thinks so. But ceremony is the glue that holds Videssos together, so he does go through with it, and then grumbles when no one outside the palaces can hear him.”

  “That’s hypocrisy.” Olyvria frowned; like Phostis, she still had some Thanasiot righteousness clinging to her.

  “I’ve told him as much,” Phostis said. “He just shrugs and says things would go worse if he didn’t give the people what they expected of him.” Before he’d been kidnapped, he would have rolled his eyes at that. Now, after a small pause for thought, he admitted, “There may be something to it.”

  “I don’t know.” Olyvria’s frown deepened. “How can you live with yourself after doing things you don’t believe in year after year after year?”

  “I didn’t say Father doesn’t believe in them. He does, for the sake of the Empire. I said he doesn’t like them. It’s not quite the same thing.”

  “Close enough, for anyone who’s not a theologian and used to splitting hairs.” But Olyvria changed the subject, which might have meant she yielded the point. “I’m glad you made peace with your brother—or he wit
h you, however you want to look at it.”

  “So am I,” Phostis said. Not wanting to deceive Olyvria about his judgment of that peace, he added, “Now we’ll see how long it lasts.”

  She took his meaning at once. “Oh,” she said in a crestfallen voice. “I’d thought you put more faith in it than that.”

  “Hope, yes. Faith?” He shrugged, then repeated, “We’ll see how long it lasts. The good god willing, it’ll hold forever. If it doesn’t—”

  “If it doesn’t, you’ll do what you have to do,” Olyvria said.

  “Aye, what I have to do,” Phostis echoed. He’d come safe out of Etchmiadzin by that rule, but if you cared to, you could use it to justify anything. He sighed, then said, “You know what the real trouble with Thanasiot doctrine is?”

  “What?” Olyvria asked. “The ecumenical patriarch could come up with a hundred without thinking.”

  “Oxeites does quite a lot without thinking,” Phostis said. “He’s not good at it.”

  Olyvria giggled, deliciously scandalized. “But what’s yours?” she asked.

  “The real trouble with Thanasiot doctrine,” Phostis declared, as if pontificating before a synod, “is that it makes the world and life out to be simpler than they are. Burn and wreck and starve and you’ve somehow made the world a better place? But what about the people who don’t want to be burned out and who like to eat till they’re fat? What about the Makuraners, who would pick up the pieces if Videssos fell apart—and who tried to make it fall apart? The gleaming path takes none of them into account. It just goes on along the track it thinks right, regardless of any complications.”

  “That’s all true enough,” Olyvria said.

  “In fact,” Phostis went on, “following the gleaming path is almost like getting caught up in a new love affair, where you just notice everything that’s good and kind about the person you love, but none of the flaws.”