The Tale of Krispos (8 page)

The veteran shrugged. “Have it your way. If you want to go on being a farmer, though, we’d best make sure these were the only Kubratoi operating around here. The first thing we’ll do is strip the bodies.” Some of the villagers had already started taking care of that. Idalkos went on, “The cuirasses and the bows are better than what we already have. The swords are more for fighting from horseback like the Kubratoi do than afoot, but we’ll still be able to use ’em.”

“Aye, but what about the wild men now?” Krispos demanded. “We were both worried they’d have a scout close to the village. If he got away and warned another, bigger band—”

“Then the swords and arrows we’re gathering won’t matter, because we don’t have enough men to hold off a big, determined band. So if there is a scout, he’d best not get away.” Idalkos cocked his head. “Well, brave captain Krispos, how would you go about making sure he doesn’t?”

In a tone of voice only slightly different, the veteran’s question would have been mockery. As it was, though, he seemed rather to be setting Krispos a problem, the way Varades sometimes had when he gave the youth a long, hard word to spell out. Krispos thought hard. “If most of us march down the road toward the village,” he said at last, “anybody would be sure to notice us. A rider could get away easy enough by going wide around us, but he’d come back to the road after he did, to find out what had happened to his friends. So maybe we ought to set some archers in ambush just up ahead there, before the bugger could round that bend and see what we’ve done to the rest of the wild men.”

“Maybe we should.” Grinning, Idalkos gave Krispos a Videssian military salute, clenched fist over heart. He turned to Phostis. “Skotos take you, man, why couldn’t you have raised a son who was discontented with following in his father’s footsteps?”

“Because I raised one with sense instead,” Krispos’ father said. “Better to be turning up the ground than to have it tossed on top of you on account of you’ve been killed too young.”

Krispos nodded vigorously. Idalkos sighed. “All right, all right. It’s a good scheme, anyhow; I think it’ll work.” He started yelling to the villagers. A couple of them cut branches and vines to make travois on which to drag back their dead and the three or four men hurt too badly to walk. They left the horses of the Kubratoi for the ambush party to fetch back, and the wild men’s corpses for ravens’ meat.

When Krispos watched his plan unfold, he felt the same awe that seeing the seeds he had planted grow to maturity always gave him. Just as he’d guessed, a lone Kubrati was sitting on his horse a couple of miles closer to the village than his comrades had rested. The rider started violently at the sight of spear-waving Videssians bearing down on him. He kicked his horse to a trot, then to a gallop. The villagers gave chase, but could not catch him.

As Krispos had expected, the Kubrati rode back to the road. The youth and Idalkos grinned at each other as they watched the column of dust the wild man’s horse kicked up fade in the distance. “That should do for him,” Krispos said happily. “Now we can head for home.”

They arrived not long after sunset—a little before the raiders would have hit the village if they still lived. In the fading light, Krispos saw women and children waiting anxiously outside their homes, wondering whether husbands, fathers, sons, and lovers would come back again.

As one, the returning men shouted, “Phos!” Not only was it a cry no Kubratoi would make, their loved ones recognized their voices. Shouting themselves, they rushed toward the victorious farmers. Some of their glad cries turned to wails as they saw not all the men had come home safe. For most of them, though, it was a time of joy.

Embracing his mother, Krispos noticed how far he had to stoop to kiss her. Stranger still was the kiss he got from Evdokia. In the passage from one day to the next, he’d paid scant heed to the way his sister had grown, but suddenly she felt like a woman in his arms. He needed a moment to realize she was as old now as Zoranne had been on that Midwinter’s Day.

As if the thought of Zoranne were enough to conjure her up, he found himself kissing her next. Their embrace was awkward; he had to lean over her belly, now big with child, to reach her lips.

Close by the two of them, a woman shouted, “Where’s my Hermon?”

“It’s all right, Ormisda,” Krispos told her. “He’s one of the archers we left behind to trap the wild man we couldn’t catch. Anyone you don’t see here is waiting in that ambush.”

“Oh, Phos be praised!” Ormisda said. She kissed Krispos, too, though she was close to three times his age. More people kissed him—and one another—over the next hour than he’d seen during half a dozen Midwinter’s Days rolled into one.

Then, in the middle of the celebration, the archers returned to the village. Though everyone fell on them with happy shouts—Ormisda almost smothered Hermon against her ample bosom—they hung back from fully joining the rest of the villagers. Krispos knew what that had to mean. “He got away,” he said.

He knew it sounded like an accusation. So did the archers. They hung their heads. “We must have shot twenty arrows at him and his horse,” one of them said defensively. “Some hit, too—the yells he let out had to be curses.”

“He got away,” Krispos repeated. It was the worst thing he could think of to say. No, not so; a moment later he found something worse yet: “He’ll bring the rest of the Kubratoi down on us.”

The celebration died very quickly after that.

T
HE NEXT FIVE DAYS PASSED IN A BLUR OF APPREHENSION FOR
Krispos. That was true of most of the villagers, but Krispos’ dread had two causes. Like everyone else, he was sure the Kubratoi would exact a terrible revenge for the slaughter of their raiding party. But that, for him, was only secondary, for his father’s wounded shoulder had gone bad.

Phostis, as was his way, tried to make light of the injury. But he could barely use his left arm and quickly came down with a fever. None of the poultices the village women applied to the wound did any good. Phostis had always been burly, but now, with shocking suddenness, the flesh seemed to melt from his bones.

Thus Krispos was almost relieved when, late that fifth afternoon, a lookout posted in a tall tree shouted, “Horsemen!” Like the rest of the men, he dashed for his weapons—against Kubratoi, at least, he could hit back. And in the heat of fighting, he would have no time to worry about his father.

The lookout shouted again. “Hundreds of horsemen!” His voice wobbled with fear. Women and children were already streaming into the forest, to hide as best they could. “Hundreds and hundreds!” the lookout cried.

Some of the farmers threw down spears and bows and bolted with the women. Krispos grabbed at one who ran in front of him, but Idalkos shook his head. “What’s the use?” the veteran said. “If they outnumber us that bad, a few more on our side won’t matter much. We can’t win; all we can do is hurt the bastards as bad as we’re able.”

Krispos clutched his spear shaft so tight his knuckles whitened on it. Now he did not need the lookout to know the wild men were coming. He could hear the hooves of their horses, quiet now but growing louder with dreadful speed.

He set himself.
Take one out with the spear,
he thought,
then drag another one off his horse and stab him.
After that—if he still lived after that—he’d see what other damage he could do.

“Won’t be long now, lads,” Idalkos said, calm as if the villagers were drawn up for parade. “We’ll yell ‘Phos!’ again, just like we did the first time, and pray for the good god to watch over us.”

“Phos!” That was not one of the farmers standing in ragged line in front of their houses. It was the lookout. He sounded so wild and shrill that Krispos wondered if he had lost his mind. Then the man said, “They’re not Kubratoi, they’re Videssian troopers!”

For a moment, the villagers stared at one another, as if the lookout had shouted in a foreign tongue. Then they cheered louder than they had after they first beat the Kubratoi. Idalkos’ voice rose above the rest. “Stankos!” he said. “Stankos brought us our soldiers back!”

“Stankos!” everyone shouted. “Hurrah for Stankos!” “Good old Stankos!”

Stankos, Krispos thought, was getting more praise jammed into a few minutes than he’d had in the past five years. Krispos shouted the farmer’s name, too, over and over, till his throat turned raw. He had stared death in the face since the lookout called. Nothing could ever frighten him worse. Now he, also, knew what reprieve felt like.

Before long, the Videssian cavalrymen pounded into the village. Stankos was with them, riding a borrowed horse. Half a dozen farmers pulled him off the beast, as if he were a Kubrati. The pounding he got was almost as hard as if he had been.

Krispos quickly counted the troopers. As best he could tell, there were seventy-one of them. So much for the lookout’s frightened
hundreds and hundreds,
he thought.

The horsemen’s captain bemusedly watched the villagers caper about. “You don’t seem to have much need for us,” he remarked.

“No, sir.” Idalkos stiffened to attention. “We thought we did, when we didn’t know for sure how many Kubratoi were about. You gave us a bad turn there—our lookout mistook you for a band of the wild men.”

“By the bodies, I saw you’d dealt with the ones you found,” the captain said. “Far as we know, that’s the lot of them. I’d say they were just out for a little thievery. There’s no general invasion, or anything like that.”

A small band operating on its own, Krispos thought. The day he first picked up a sword, that was what Varades had told him the peasants might be able to handle. The veteran had known what he was talking about.

The Videssian captain turned to a priest beside him. “Looks like we won’t need you today, Gelasios, except maybe for a prayer of thanksgiving.”

“Nor am I sorry,” Gelasios answered. “I can heal wounded men, aye, but I also think on the suffering they endure before I come to them, so I am just as well pleased not to ply my trade.”

“Sir!” Krispos said. He had to repeat himself before the priest looked his way. “You’re a healer, holy sir?”

“What of it, young man?” Gelasios said. “Phos be praised, you seem hale enough.”

“Not me,” Krispos said impatiently. “My father. This way.”

Without looking to see whether Gelasios followed, he hurried toward his house. When he threw open the door, a new smell came out with the usual odors of stale smoke and food, a sweetish, sickly smell that made his stomach want to turn over.

“Yes, I see,” Gelasios murmured at Krispos’ elbow. The priest’s nostrils flared wide, as if to gauge from the scent of corruption how great a challenge he faced. He went inside, stooping a little to get through the doorway. Now it was Krispos’ turn to follow him.

Gelasios stooped beside Phostis, who lay near the edge of the straw bedding. Bright with fever, Phostis’ eyes stared through the priest. Krispos bit his lip. In those sunken eyes, in the way his father’s skin clung tight to bones beneath it, he saw the outline of coming death.

If Gelasios saw it, too, he gave no sign. He pulled Phostis’ tunic aside, peeled off the latest worthless poultice to examine the wound. With the poultice came a thick wave of that rotting smell. Krispos took an involuntary step backward, then checked, hating himself—what was he doing, retreating from his father?

“It’s all right, lad,” Gelasios said absently, the first sign since he’d come into the house that he remembered Krispos was with him. He forgot him again, an instant later, and seemed to forget Phostis, too. His eyes went upward, as if to see the sun through the thatched roof of the cottage. “We bless thee, Phos, Lord with the great and good mind,” he intoned, “by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.”

Krispos echoed his prayer. It was the only one he knew all the way through; everyone in the whole Empire, he supposed, had Phos’ creed by heart.

Gelasios said the prayer again, and again, and again. The priest’s breathing grew slow and deep and steady. His eyes slid shut, but Krispos was somehow sure he remained very much aware of self and surroundings. Then, without warning, Gelasios reached out and seized Phostis’ wounded shoulder.

The priest’s hands were not gentle. Krispos expected his father to shriek at that rough treatment, but Phostis lay still, locked in his fever dream. Though Gelasios no longer prayed aloud, his breathing kept the same rhythm he had established.

Krispos looked from the priest’s set face to his hands, and to the wound beneath them. The hair on his arms and at the nape of his neck suddenly prickled with awe—as he watched, that gaping, pus-filled gash began to close.

When only a thin, pale scar remained, Gelasios lifted his hands away from Phostis’ shoulder. The flow of healing that had passed from him to Krispos’ father stopped with almost audible abruptness. Gelasios tried to rise; he staggered, as if he felt the force of that separation.

“Wine,” he muttered hoarsely. “I am fordone.”

Only then did Krispos realize how much energy the healing had drained from Gelasios. He knew he should rush to fulfill the priest’s request, but he could not, not at once. He was looking at his father. Phostis’ eyes met his, and there was reason in them. “Get him his wine, son,” Phostis said, “and while you’re at it, you might bring some for me.”

“Yes, Father, of course. And I pray your pardon, holy sir.” Krispos was glad for an excuse to rummage for clean cups and the best skin of wine in the house: it meant no one would have to see the tears on his face.

“Phos’ blessings on you, lad,” Gelasios said. Though the wine put some color back in his face, he still moved stiffly, as if he had aged twenty years in the few minutes he’d needed to heal Phostis. Seeing the concern on Krispos’ face, he managed a wry chuckle. “I’m not quite so feeble as I appear—a meal and good night’s sleep, and I’ll be well enough. Even without, at need I could heal another man now, likely two, and take no lasting harm.”

Too abashed to speak, Krispos only nodded. His father said, “I just praise Phos you were here to heal me, holy sir. I do thank you for it.” He twisted his head so he could peer down at his shoulder and at the wound there that, by the look of it, could have been five years old. “Isn’t that fine?” he said to no one in particular.