Krispos the Emperor (42 page)

Soon Phostis' concerns became more immediate. Not least among them was seeing if he couldn't inconspicuously vanish from the raiding band. He couldn't. The horsemen kept him in their midst; Syagrios clung to him like a leech.
Maybe when the fighting starts,
he thought.

For the first day and a half of riding, they remained in territory under Thanasiot rule. Peasants waved from the fields and shouted slogans at the horsemen as they trotted past. The riders shouted back less often as time went by: muscles unused since fall were claiming their price. Phostis hadn't been so saddle sore in years.

Another day on horseback brought the raiders into country where, instead of cheering, the peasants fled at first sight of them. That occasioned argument among Phostis' companions: some wanted to scatter and destroy the peasants and their huts, while others preferred to press ahead without delay.

In the end, Themistios came down in favor of the second group. "There's a monastery outside Aptos I want to hit," he declared, "and I'm not going to waste my time with this riffraff till it's smashed. We can nail peasants on the way home." With a large, juicy target thus set before them, the raiders stopped arguing. It would have taken a very bold man to quarrel with Themistios, anyhow.

They came to the monastery a little before sunset. Some of the monks were still in the fields. Howling like demons, the Thanasioi rode them down. Swords rose, fell, and rose again smeared with scarlet. Instead of prayers to Phos, screams rose into the reddening sky.

"We'll burn the building!" Themistios shouted. "Even monks have too fornicating much." He spurred his horse straight toward the monastery gate and got inside before the startled monks could slam it shut against him. His sword forced back the first blue-robe who came running up, and a moment later more of his wolves were in there with him.

Several of the raiders carried smoldering sticks of punk. Oil-soaked torches caught quickly. Syagrios pressed one into Phostis' hand. "Here," he growled. "Do some good with this."
Or else,
his voice warned. So did the way he cocked his sword.

Phostis threw the torch at a wall. He'd hoped it would fall short, and it did, but it rolled up against the wood. Flames crackled, caught, and began to spread. Syagrios pounded him on the back, as if he'd just been initiated into the brotherhood of wreckers. Shuddering, he realized he had.

A monk waving a cudgel rushed at him, shouting something incoherent. He wanted to tell the shaven-headed holy man it was all a dreadful mistake, that he didn't want to be here and hadn't truly intended to harm the monastery. But the monk didn't care about any of that. All he wanted to do was smash the closet invader—who happened to be Phostis.

He parried the blue-robe's first wild swipe, and his second. "By the good god, cut him!" Syagrios shouted in disgust. "What do you think—he's going to get tired and go away?"

Phostis didn't quite parry the third blow. It glanced off his shin, hard enough to make him bite his lip against the pain. He realized with growing dismay that he couldn't just try to hold off the monk, not when the fellow wanted nothing more than to kill him.

The monk drew back his club for yet another swing. Phostis slashed at him, feeling the blade bite. Behind him, Syagrios roared with glee. Phostis would cheerfully have killed the ruffian for forcing him into a position where he either had to hurt the monk or get himself maimed or killed.

None of the other raiders had any such compunctions. Several had dismounted, the better to torture the monks they overcame. Screams echoed down the halls that had resounded with hymns of praise to Phos. Watching the Thanasioi at their work—or was it better called sport?—Phostis felt his stomach lurch like a horse stepping into a snow-covered hole.

"Away! Away!" Themistios shouted. "It'll burn now, and we have more to do before we head home."

What does he have in mind?
Phostis thought. About the only thing that fit in with what the raiders had done at the monastery was torching a home for penniless widows and orphans. Videssos the city had several such; he wondered if Aptos was a big enough town to boast any.

He never got the chance to find out, for as he and the Thanasioi rode away from the monastery, a troop of imperial soldiers came storming after them from out of Aptos. Faint in the distance but growing louder fast, Phostis heard a wary cry he'd never imagined could sound so welcome: "Krispos! The Avtokrator Krispos! Krispos!"

A good many of the Thanasioi had bows as well as sabers. They started shooting at the imperials. The garrison troops, like most imperial cavalry, were archers, too. They shot back. The advantage lay on their side, because they wore mail shirts and helmets while almost all the Thanasioi were unarmored.

Phostis yanked his horse's head around and booted the animal toward the imperials. All he thought about was giving himself up and doing whatever penance the patriarch or some other ecclesiastic set him for his sins in the monastery. Among the things he forgot was the saber he clutched in his right fist.

To the onrushing cavalrymen, he must have looked like a fanatical Thanasiot challenging them single-handed so he could go straight from death to the gleaming path beyond the sun. An arrow whistled past his ear. Another one buried itself in the ground by the horse's forefoot. Another one hit him in the shoulder.

At first he felt only the impact, and thought a kicked-up stone had grazed him. Then he looked down and saw the pale ash shaft sticking out of him. His eyes focused on the gray goose feathers of the fletching.
How stupid,
he thought.
I've been shot by my own father's men.

All at once, the pain struck, and with it weakness. His own blood ran hot down his chest and began to stain his tunic. He swayed in the saddle. More arrows hissed past.

Syagrios came up beside him at a gallop. "Have you gone out of your head?" he yelled. "You can't fight them all by yourself." His eyes went wide when he saw Phostis was wounded. "See what I'm telling you? We got to get out of here."

Neither Phostis' wits nor his body was working very well. Syagrios saw that, too. He grabbed the reins away from the younger man and led Phostis' horse alongside his own. The horse was nasty, and tried to balk. Syagrios was nastier, and wouldn't let it. A couple of other Thanasioi came back to cover their retreat.

The weight of armor on the imperial cavalrymen slowed them in a long chase. The raiders managed to stay in front until darkness let them give the imperials the slip. Several were hurt by then, and a couple of others lost when their horses went down.

Phostis' world focused on the burning in his shoulder. Everything else seemed far away, unimportant. He scarcely noticed when the Thanasioi halted beside a little stream, though not having to fight to stay in the saddle was a relief.

Syagrios advanced on him with a knife. "We'll have to tend to that," he said. "Here, lie flat."

No one dared light a fire. Syagrios held his head close to Phostis to see what he was doing as he cut the tunic away from the arrow. He examined the wound, made an abstracted clucking noise, and pulled something out of the pouch he wore on his belt.

"What's that?" Phostis asked.

"Arrow-drawing spoon," Syagrios answered. "Can't just pull the fornicating thing out; the point'll have barbs. Hold still and shut up. Digging in there will hurt, but you won't be as torn up inside this way. Now—"

In spite of Syagrios' injunction, Phostis groaned. Nor were his the only cries that rose to the uncaring sky as the raiders did what they could for their wounded comrades. Now darkness didn't much matter; Syagrios was working more by feel than by sight as he forced the narrow, cupped end of the spoon down along the arrow's shaft toward the head.

Phostis felt the spoon grate on something. Syagrios grunted in satisfaction. "Here we go. Now we can get it out. Wasn't too deep—you're lucky."

The taste of blood filled Phostis' mouth: he'd bitten his lip while the ruffian guddled for the arrow. He could smell his own blood, too. He choked out, "If I were lucky, it would have missed me."

"Ha," Syagrios said. "Can't say you're wrong there. Hold on, now. Here it comes, here it comes—yes!" He got the spoon out of the wound, and the arrow with it. He grunted again. "No blood spurting—just a dribble. I'd say you'll make it."

In place of a canteen, the ruffian carried a wineskin on his belt. He poured a stream of wine onto Phostis' wound. After the probing with the spoon and the drawing of the arrow, the abused flesh felt as if it were being bathed with fire. Phostis thrashed and swore and clumsily tried to hit Syagrios left-handed.

"Easy there, curse you," Syagrios said. "Just hold still. You wash out a wound with wine, it's less likely to rot. You
want
pus and fever? You may get 'em anyways, mind, but wouldn't you rather bump up your odds?"

He wadded up a rag, pressed it to Phostis' shoulder to soak up the blood that still oozed from the wound, and tied it in place with another strip of cloth. "Thank you," Phostis got out, a little slower than he should have: he still struggled with the irony of being treated by a man he despised.

"Any time." Syagrios set a hand on his good shoulder. "I never would've thought it, but you really do want to walk the gleaming path, don't you? You laid out that monk fine as you please, and then you were ready to take on all the imperials at the same time. More brave than smart, maybe, but to the ice with smart, sometimes. You done better'n I would've dreamed."

"To the ice with smart, sometimes," Phostis repeated wearily. At last he'd found what it took to satisfy Syagrios: be too cowardly to refuse what he was ordered and then botch what he'd intended as a desertion. The moral there was too elusive for him. He let out a long, worn sigh.

"Yeah, sleep while you can," Syagrios said. "We'll have some fancy riding to do tomorrow before we're sure we've broken loose from the stinking imperials. But I've got to get you back to Etchmiadzin. Now that I know for sure you're with us, we'll have all kinds of things we can use you for."

Sleep? Phostis wouldn't have imagined it possible. Even though the worst of the agony had left his shoulder now that the arrow was out, it still ached like a rotting tooth and throbbed in time to his pulse. But as the wild excitement of the ride and the fight faded, exhaustion rolled over him like a great black tide. Rough ground, aching shoulder—no matter. He slept hard.

He woke from a dream where a wolf was alternately biting and kicking him to find Syagrios shaking him back to consciousness. The shoulder still hurt fiercely, but he managed a nod when the ruffian asked if he could ride.

He did his best to forget as much as he could of the journey back to Etchmiadzin. However much he tried, he couldn't forget the torment of more wine poured into his wound at every halt. The shoulder got hot, but only right around the hole in it 
so he supposed the treatment, no matter how agonizing, did some good.

He wished a healer-priest would look at the wound, but had not seen any such among the Thanasioi. That made theological sense: if the body, like all things of this world, sprang from Skotos. what point to making any special effort to preserve it? Such an attitude was easy enough to maintain as an abstract principle. When it came down to Phostis' personal body and its pain, abstract principles got trivial fast.

The rising foothills ahead seemed welcome, not because Etchmiadzin was the home the Thanasioi had hoped it would become for him, but because they meant the imperial soldiers would not catch him on the road and finish the job of killing him. And, he reminded himself, Olyvria would be back at the fortress. The aching wound kept him from being as delighted about that as he would have been otherwise.

When the raiders drew near the valley that cupped Etchmiadzin. Themistios rode up to Syagrios and said, "My men and I will follow the gleaming path against the materialists now. Go as Phos wills you; we cannot follow any farther."

"I can take him in from here easy enough," Syagrios answered, nodding. "Do what you need to do, Themistios, and may the good god keep his eyes on you and your lads."

Singing a hymn with Thanasiot lyrics, the zealots wheeled their horses and rode back out of the holy work of slaughter and destruction. Syagrios and Phostis kept on toward the stronghold of Etchmiadzin.

"We'll get you patched up proper, make sure that arm's all right before we send you out again." Syagrios said as the gray stone mass of the fortress came in view. "Might be just as well I'm here, too, in case we need to settle anything while Livanios is in the field."

"Whatever you say." All Phostis wanted was a chance to get down from his horse and not have to mount again for, say, the next ten years.

Etchmiadzin seemed strangely spacious as he and Syagrios rode through the muddy streets toward the fortress. Wits dulled by pain and fatigue. Phostis needed longer than he should have to figure out why. At last he realized that most of the soldiers who had swelled the town through the winter were off glorifying the lord with the great and good mind by laying waste to what they reckoned the creations of his evil foe.

Only a couple of sentries stood guard at the fortress gate. The inner ward felt empty without warriors at weapons practice or listening to one of Livanios' orations. Most of the heresiarch's chief aides seemed to have gone with him; at least no one came out of the keep to take a report from Syagrios.