The Tale of Krispos (2 page)

For a bad moment he thought it was, and braced himself for another smack. But then his father said, “Hmm—maybe it isn’t. Put it like this—no matter how clean we are, no Kubrati will find you or me pretty. You follow that?”

“Yes,” Krispos said, although he thought his father—with his wide shoulders, neat black beard, and dark eyes set so deep beneath shaggy brows that sometimes the laughter lurking there was almost hidden—a fine and splendid man. But, he had to admit, that wasn’t the same as pretty.

“All right, then. Now you’ve already seen how the Kubratoi are thieves. Phos, boy, they’ve stolen all of us, and our animals, too. And if one of them saw your mother looking especially pretty, the way she can—” Listening, she smiled at Krispos’ father, but did not speak. “—he might want to take her away for his very own. We don’t want that to happen, do we?”

“No!” Krispos’ eyes got wide as he saw how clever his mother and father were. “I see! I understand! It’s a trick, like when the wizard made Gemistos’ hair turn green at the show he gave.”

“A little like that, anyhow,” his father agreed. “But that was real magic. Gemistos’ hair really
was
green, till the wizard changed it back to brown again. This is more a game, like when men and women switch clothes sometimes on the Midwinter’s Day festival. Do I turn into your mama because I’m wearing a dress?”

“Of course not!” Krispos giggled. But that wasn’t supposed to fool anyone; as his father said, it was only a game. Here, now, his mother’s prettiness remained, though she was trying to hide it so no one noticed. And if hiding something in plain sight wasn’t magic, Krispos didn’t know what was.

H
E HAD THAT THOUGHT AGAIN THE NEXT DAY, WHEN THE WILD
men took their captives into Kubrat. A couple of passes opened invitingly, but the Kubratoi headed for neither of them. Instead, they led the Videssian farmers down a forest track that seemed destined only to run straight into the side of the mountains.

But it did not run into the mountains—rather, into a narrow defile the trees and a last spur of hill screened from view. Though the sky stayed blue overhead, everything in the gorge was lost in shadow, as if it were twilight. Somewhere a nightjar hooted, thinking its time had come.

Strung out along the bottom of that steep, twisting gorge, people and animals could move but slowly. True evening came when they were only part of the way through the mountains.

“It’s a good trick,” Krispos’ father said grudgingly as they settled down to camp. “Even if imperial soldiers do come after us, a handful of men could hold them out of this pass forever.”

“Soldiers?” Krispos said, amazed. That Videssian troopers might be riding after the Kubratoi had never crossed his mind. “You mean the Empire cares enough about us to fight to get us back?”

His father’s chuckle had little real amusement in it. “I know the only time you ever saw soldiers was that time a couple of years ago, when the harvest was so bad they didn’t trust us to sit still for the tax collector unless he had archers at his back. But aye, they might fight to get us back. Videssos needs farmers on the ground as much as Kubrat does. Everybody needs farmers, boy; it’d be a hungry world without ’em.”

Most of that went over Krispos’ head. “Soldiers,” he said again, softly. So he—for that was how he thought of it—was so important the Avtokrator would send soldiers to return him to his proper place! Then it was as if—well, almost as if—he had caused those soldiers to be sent. And surely that was as if—well, perhaps as if—he were Avtokrator himself. It was a good enough dream to fall asleep on, anyhow.

When he woke up the next morning, he was certain something was wrong. He kept peering around, trying to figure out what it was. At last his eyes went up to the strip of rock far overhead that the rising sun was painting with light. “That’s the wrong direction!” he blurted. “Look! The sun’s coming up in the west!”

“Phos have mercy, I think the lad’s right!” Tzykalas the cobbler said close by. He drew a circle on his breast, itself the sign of the good god’s sun. Other people started babbling; Krispos heard the fear in their voices.

Then his father yelled “Stop it!” so loudly that they actually did. Into that sudden silence, Phostis went on, “What’s more likely, that the world has turned upside down or that this canyon’s wound around so we couldn’t guess east from west?”

Krispos felt foolish. From the expressions on the folk nearby, so did they. In a surly voice, Tzykalas said, “Your boy was the one who started us hopping, Phostis.”

“Well, so he was. What about it? Who’s the bigger fool, a silly boy or the grown man who takes him seriously?”

Someone laughed at that. Tzykalas flushed. His hands curled into fists. Krispos’ father stood still and quiet, waiting. Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Tzykalas turned away. Two or three more people laughed then.

Krispos’ father took no notice of them. Quietly he said, “The next time things aren’t the way you expect, son, think before you talk, eh?”

Krispos nodded. He felt foolish now himself. One more thing to remember, he thought. The bigger he got, the more such things he found. He wondered how grown people managed to keep everything straight.

Late that afternoon, the canyon opened up. Green land lay ahead, land not much different from the fields and forests around Krispos’ home village. “Is that Kubrat?” he asked, pointing.

One of the wild men overheard him. “Is Kubrat. Is good to be back. Is home,” he said in halting Videssian.

Till then, Krispos hadn’t thought about the raiders having homes—to him, they had seemed a phenomenon of nature, like a blizzard or a flood. Now, though, a happy smile was on the Kubrati’s face. He looked like a man heading home after some hard work. Maybe he had little boys at that home, or little girls. Krispos hadn’t thought about the raiders having children, either.

He hadn’t thought about a lot of things, he realized. When he said that out loud, his father laughed. “That’s because you’re still a child. As you grow, you’ll work through the ones that matter to you.”

“But I want to be able to know about all those things now,” Krispos said. “It isn’t fair.”

“Maybe not.” No longer laughing, his father put a hand on his shoulder. “But I’ll tell you this—a chicken comes out of its egg knowing everything it needs to know to be a chicken. There’s more to being a man; it takes a while to learn. So which would you rather be, son, a chicken or a man?”

Krispos folded his hands into his armpits and flapped imaginary wings. He let out a couple of loud clucks, then squealed when his father tickled his ribs.

The next morning, Krispos saw in the distance several—well, what were they? Neither tents nor houses, but something in between. They had wheels and looked as if animals could pull them. His father did not know what to call them, either.

“May I ask one of the Kubratoi?” Krispos said.

His mother started to shake her head, but his father said, “Let him, Tatze. We may as well get used to them, and they’ve liked the boy ever since he stood up to them that first night.”

So he asked one of the wild men trotting by on his pony. The Kubrati stared at him and started to laugh. “So the little khagan does not know of yurts, eh? Those are yurts you see, the perfect homes for following the flocks.”

“Will you put us in yurts, too?” Krispos liked the idea of being able to live now one place, now another.

But the horseman shook his head. “You are farmer folk, good only for raising plants. And as plants are rooted to the ground, your houses will be rooted, too.” He spat to show his contempt for people who had to stay in one spot, then touched the heels of his boots to his horse’s flanks and rode off.

Krispos looked after him, a little hurt. “I’ll travel, too, one day,” he said loudly. The Kubrati paid no attention to him. He sighed and went back to his parents. “I
will
travel!” he told his father. “I will.”

“You’ll travel in a few minutes,” his father answered. “They’re getting ready to move us along again.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Krispos said. “I meant travel when
I
want to, and go where
I
want to.”

“Maybe you will, son.” His father sighed, rose, and stretched. “But not today.”

J
UST AS CAPTIVES FROM MANY VIDESSIAN VILLAGES HAD JOINED
together to make one large band on the way to Kubrat, so now they were taken away from the main group—five, ten, twenty families at a time, to go off to the lands they would work for their new masters.

Most of the people the Kubratoi told to go off with the group that included Krispos’ father were from his village, but some were not, and some of the villagers had to go someplace else. When they protested being broken up, the wild men ignored their pleas. “Not as if you were a clan the gods formed,” a raider said, the same scorn in his voice that Krispos had heard from the Kubrati who explained what yurts were. And, like that rider, he rode away without listening to any reply.

“What does he mean, gods?” Krispos asked. “Isn’t there just Phos? And Skotos,” he added after a moment, naming the good god’s wicked foe in a smaller voice.

“The Kubratoi don’t know of Phos,” his father told him. “They worship demons and spirits and who knows what. After they die, they’ll spend forever in Skotos’ ice for their wickedness, too.”

“I hope there are priests here,” Tatze said nervously.

“We’ll get along, whether or not,” Phostis said. “We know what the good is, and we’ll follow it.” Krispos nodded. That made sense to him. He always tried to be good—unless being bad looked like a lot more fun. He hoped Phos would forgive him. His father usually did, and in his mind the good god was a larger version of his father, one who watched the whole world instead of just a farm.

Later that day, one of the Kubratoi pointed ahead and said, “There your new village.”

“It’s big!” Krispos said. “Look at all the houses!”

His father had a better idea of what to look for. “Aye, lots of houses. Where are the people, though? Hardly any in the fields, hardly any in the village.” He sighed. “I expect the reason I don’t see ’em is that they’re not there to see.”

As the party of Kubratoi and captives drew near, a few men and women did emerge from their thatch-roofed cottages to stare at the newcomers. Krispos had never had much. These thin, poorly clad wretches, though, showed him other folk could have even less.

The wild men waved the village’s new inhabitants forward to meet the old. Then they wheeled their horses and rode away…rode, Krispos supposed, back to their yurts.

As he came into the village, he saw that many of the houses stood empty; some were only half thatched, others had rafters falling down, still others had chunks of clay gone from the wall to reveal the woven branches within.

His father sighed again. “I suppose I should be glad we’ll have roofs over our heads.” He turned to the families uprooted from Videssos. “We might as well pick out the places we’ll want to live in. Me, I have my eye on that house right there.” He pointed to an abandoned dwelling as dilapidated as any of the others, set near the edge of the village.

As he and Tatze, followed by Krispos and Evdokia, headed toward the home they had chosen, one of the men who belonged to this village came up to confront him. “Who do you think you are, to take a house without so much as a by-your-leave?” the fellow asked. Even to a farm boy like Krispos, his accent sounded rustic.

“My name’s Phostis,” Krispos’ father said. “Who are you to tell me I can’t, when this place is falling to pieces around you?”

The other newcomers added their voices to his. The man looked from them to his own followers, who were fewer and less sure of themselves. He lost his bluster as a punctured bladder loses air. “I’m Roukhas,” he said. “Headman here, at least until all you folk came.”

“We don’t want what’s yours, Roukhas,” Krispos’ father assured him. He smiled a sour smile. “Truth is, I’d be just as glad never to have met you, because that’d mean I was still back in Videssos.” Even Roukhas nodded at that, managing a wry chuckle. Phostis went on, “We’re here, though, and I don’t see much point in having to build from scratch when there’re all these places ready to hand.”

“Aye, well, put that way, I suppose you have a point.” Roukhas stepped backward and waved Phostis toward the house he had chosen.

As if his concession were some sort of signal, the rest of the longtime inhabitants of the village hurried up to mingle with the new arrivals. Indeed, they fell on them like long-lost cousins—as, Krispos thought, a little surprised at himself, they were.

“They didn’t even know what the Avtokrator’s name was,” Krispos’ mother marveled as the family settled down to sleep on the ground inside their new house.

“Aye, well, they need to worry about the khagan more,” his father answered. Phostis yawned an enormous yawn. “A lot of ’em, too, were born right here, not back home. I shouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t even remember there
was
an Avtokrator.”

“But still,” Krispos’ mother said, “they talked with us as we would with someone from the capital, from Videssos the city—someone besides the tax man, I mean. And we’re from the back of beyond.”