The Tale of Krispos (140 page)

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.

As Phostis soon discovered, that was because the keep was almost empty, too. His footsteps and Syagrios’ echoed down the halls that had been crammed with soldiers. At least life did exist inside. A trooper came out of the chamber where Livanios had been wont to hold audiences as if he were Avtokrator. Seeing Phostis leaning on Syagrios, he asked the ruffian, “What happened to him?”

“What does it look like?” Syagrios growled. “He just found out he’s been chosen patriarch and he can’t even walk for the joy of it.” The Thanasiot gaped; Phostis fought not to giggle as he watched the fellow realize Syagrios was being sarcastic. Syagrios pointed to the stained bandage on his shoulder. “He got shot in a scrape with the imperials—he did good.”

“All right, but why bring him back here?” the soldier said. “He don’t look like he’s hurt too bad.”

“You likely can’t tell under all the dirt and stuff, but this is the Emperor’s brat,” Syagrios answered. “We need to take a little more care with him than with your regular fighter.”

“Why?” Like any Videssian, the Thanasiot was ready to argue about his faith on any excuse or none. “We’re all alike on the gleaming path.”

“Yeah, but Phostis here has special worth,” Syagrios returned. “If we use him right, he can help us put lots of new people on the gleaming path.”

The soldier chewed on that: literally, for he gnawed at his lower lip while he thought. At last, grudgingly, he nodded. “The doctrine may be sound.”

Syagrios turned his head to mutter into Phostis’ ear, “The clincher is, I’d have chopped him into raven’s meat if he said me nay.” He gave his attention back to the trooper. “Is anybody left alive in the kitchens? We’re starved, and not on purpose.”

“Should be someone there,” the fellow answered, though he frowned at Syagrios’ levity.

Phostis had not had much appetite since he was wounded. Now his belly rumbled hungrily at the thought of food. Maybe that meant he was getting better.

The smell of bean porridge and onions and bread in the kitchens made his insides growl all over again. Bowls were piled in great stacks there, against a need that had for the moment gone. Only a handful of people sat at the long tables. Phostis’ heart gave a lurch—one of them was Olyvria.

She looked around to see who the newcomers were. Phostis must have been as grimy as Syagrios had said, for she recognized the ruffian first. Then her eyes traveled from Phostis’ face to the stained bandage on his shoulder and back again. He saw them widen. “What happened?” she exclaimed as she hurried over to the two men.

“I got shot,” Phostis answered. Keeping his tone as light as he could, he went on, “I’ll probably live.” He couldn’t say anything more, but did his silent best to urge her not to give anything away. Having Syagrios find out—or even suspect—they were lovers would be more likely fatal than the shaft the cavalryman had put into him.

They were lucky. Syagrios evidently didn’t suspect, and so wasn’t alert for any small clues they might have given him. He boomed, “Aye, he fought well—better’n I had any reason to think he would, my lady. He was riding toward the imperials when one of ’em got him. I drew the arrow myself and cleaned the wound. It seems to be healing well enough.”

Now Olyvria looked at Phostis as if she didn’t know what to make of him. She probably didn’t: he hadn’t gone out intending to fight, let alone well enough to draw praise from Syagrios. But self-preservation had made him swing his sword against the monk with the club, and the ruffian thought he’d been attacking the imperials, not trying to give himself up to them. The world got very strange sometimes.

“Could I please have some food before I fall over?” he asked plaintively.

Between them, Syagrios and Olyvria all but dragged him to a table, sat him down, and brought back bread, hard crumbly cheese, and wine he reckoned fit only for washing out wounded shoulders. He knocked back a hefty mug of it anyhow, and felt it mount quickly to his head. In between bites of bread and cheese, he gave Olyvria a carefully edited version of how he’d ended up on the pointed end of an arrow.

“I see,” she said when he was through. He wasn’t sure she did, but then he wasn’t exactly sure himself of the wherefores of everything that had happened. She turned to Syagrios. Speaking carefully herself, and as if Phostis were not sitting across from her, she said, “When he was ordered to go out raiding, I thought the plan might be to expend him to bring woe to his father.”

“That was in
your
father’s mind, my lady,” Syagrios agreed, also ignoring him, “but he doubted the lad’s faith in the gleaming path. Since it’s real, he becomes worth more to us alive than dead. That’s what I figured, anyways.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Olyvria said with what Phostis hoped was a good imitation of dispassion.

He kept munching on the loaf of bread. The falser he was to what Syagrios thought him to be, the better off he did. What was the lesson there? That Syagrios was so wicked being false to him turned good? Then how to explain the way the ruffian had cared for him, brought him back to Etchmiadzin, and now poured more of that vile but potent wine into his mug?

He raised it left-handed. “Here’s to—using my other arm soon.”

Everyone drank.

Chapter
X

S
CRIBBLING ON A MAP RUINED IT FOR FUTURE USE. SO DID
poking pins into it. Krispos had prevailed upon Zaidas to magic some red-painted pebbles so they behaved like lodestones and clung to their appointed places on the parchment even when it was rolled up. Now he wished he’d chosen some other color: when the map was unrolled, it looked too much as if it were suffering from smallpox.

And every time he unrolled it, he had to add more stones to show fresh outbreaks of Thanasiot violence. Messengers brought in a constant stream of such reports. Most, as had been true the summer before, were in the northwest quadrant of the westlands, but far from all. He glanced at dispatches and put down two stones in the hill country in the southeastern part of the gnarled peninsula that held the Empire’s heartland.

That the map lay on a folding table in the imperial pavilion rather than his study back at the palaces consoled him little. The mere fact of being on campaign would have sufficed for some Emperors, giving them the impression—justified or not—they were doing something about the religious zealots.

But Krispos saw in his mind’s eye fires rising up from the map where every red pebble was placed, heard screams of triumph and of despair. Even one of those stones should have been too many, yet several dozen measled the map.

At his side, Katakolon also stared glumly at the scarlet stones. “They’re everywhere,” he said, shaking his head in dismay.

“They do seem that way, don’t they?” Krispos said. He liked the picture no better than his son did.

“Aye, they do.” Katakolon still eyed the stippled parchment. “Which of these shows where Livanios and his main band of fighters are lurking?”

“It’s a good question,” the Avtokrator admitted. “The Empire would be better off for a good answer. I wish I could give you one. Trouble is, the heresiarch is using all the little raids as cover to conceal that main band. They could be almost anywhere.”

Put that way, the thought was especially disquieting. His own army was only a few days out of Videssos the city. If Livanios’ fanatics fell on it before it was ready to fight—Krispos shook his head. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have sentries posted. Anyone who tried surprising him would be roughly handled. If he started jumping at shadows, Livanios was ahead of the game.

Katakolon looked from the map to him. “So you’re going to have yourself another brat, are you, Father? At your age?”

“I’ve already had three brats. One more won’t wreck Videssos, I expect, not if the lot of you haven’t managed it. And yes, at my age, as I told you back in the city. The parts do still work, you see.”

“Well, yes, I suppose so, but really…” Katakolon seemed to think that was a complete sentence. It probably meant something like
just because they work doesn’t mean you have any business going around using them.

Krispos parried, “Maybe you’ll learn something watching how I handle things. The way you go on, boy, you’re going to sire enough bastards to make up your own cavalry company. Katakolon’s Whoresons they could call themselves, and be ferocious-sounding and truthful at the same time.”

He’d hoped to abash his youngest son—he’d long since given up trying to shame him over venery—but the idea delighted Katakolon. He clapped his hands and exclaimed, “And if I sire a company, Father, the lads can father themselves a couple of regiments, and my great-grandsons will end up being the whole Videssian army.”

Every so often with Iakovitzes, Krispos had to throw his hands in the air and own himself beaten. Now he found himself doing the same with Katakolon. “You’re incorrigible. Go tell Sarkis I want to see him, and try not to seduce anyone between this tent and that one.”

“Haloga guards are not to my taste,” Katakolon replied with dignity bordering on hauteur. “Now, if their daughters and sisters took service with Videssos—” Krispos made as if to throw a folding chair at him. Laughing, the youth ducked out of the tent. Krispos remembered the exotically blond and pink Haloga doxy at a revel of Anthimos, a generation before. Katakolon surely would have liked her very well.

Krispos forced his wits away from lickerish memories and back toward the map. As best he could tell, the Thanasioi were popping up everywhere at once. That made it hard for him to figure out how to fight them.

One of the guards stuck his head into the tent. Krispos straightened, expecting him to announce Sarkis. But instead he said, “Your Majesty, the mage Zaidas would have speech wit’ you.”

“Would he? Yes, of course I’ll listen to what he has to say.”

As usual, Zaidas started to prostrate himself; as usual, Krispos waved for him not to bother. Both men smiled at the little ritual. But the wizard’s lips quickly fell from their happy curve. He said, “May it please Your Majesty, these past few days my magic has enabled me to track the whereabouts of the young Majesty Phostis.”

“He’s not stayed in the same place all the while?” Krispos asked. “I thought he was still at Etchmiadzin.” Because Zaidas hadn’t detected any motion from Phostis since he’d managed to pierce the screen of Makuraner magic, Krispos had dared hope his heir was prisoner rather than convert to the gleaming path.

“No, Your Majesty, I’m afraid not. Here, let me show you.” Zaidas drew from his belt pouch a square of leather. “This is from the tanned hide of a deer, the animal having been chosen because the melting tenderness of its gaze symbolically represents the affection you feel for your kidnapped son. See these marks—here, here, here?”

Krispos saw the marks: they looked as if the deerskin had been burned here and there with the end of a hot awl. “I see them, magical sir, but I must say I don’t grasp what they mean.”

“As you know, I’ve at last been able to locate Phostis through the law of contagion. Were he remaining in Etchmiadzin, the scorch marks you see would be virtually one on top of the other. As it was, their dispersal indicates he moved some considerable distance, most probably to the south and east, and then returned to the place whence he had departed.”

“I see.” Krispos scowled down at the piece of deerskin. “And why do you think he’s been making these—movements?”

“Your Majesty, I am sufficiently pleased to be able to infer that he
has
moved, or rather moved and returned. Why he has done so is beyond the scope of my art.” Zaidas spoke with quiet determination, as if to say he did not want to know why Phostis had gone out from the Thanasiot stronghold and then back to it.

The mage was both courtier and friend; no wonder he found discretion the easier path to take. Krispos said harshly, “Magical sir, isn’t the likeliest explanation that he went out on a raid with the fanatics and then rode—rode home again?”

“That is certainly a possibility which must be considered,” Zaidas admitted. “And yet, many other explanations are possible.”

“Possible, yes, but likely? What I said fits the facts better than anything else I can think of.” Half a lifetime of judging cases had convinced Krispos that the simplest explanation was most often the right one. What could be simpler than Phostis’ joining the rebels and going out to fight for them? Krispos crumbled the deerskin in his fist and threw it to the ground. “I wish that cursed Digenis were still alive so I could have the pleasure of executing him now.”

“I sympathize, Your Majesty, and believe me, I fully appreciate the gravity of the problem this presents.”

“Problem, yes.” That was a nice, bloodless way to put it. What were you supposed to do when your son and heir turned against you? However fond he was of making plans, Krispos hadn’t made one for that set of circumstances. Now, of necessity, he began to. How would Evripos shape as heir? He’d be delighted, certainly. But would he make a good Avtokrator? Krispos didn’t know.

Zaidas must have been thinking along with him. The wizard said, “No need to deal with this on the instant, Your Majesty. Perhaps the campaign will reveal the full circumstances of what’s gone on.”

“It probably will,” Krispos said gloomily. “The trouble is, the full circumstances may be ones I’d sooner not have learned.”

Before Zaidas could answer that, Katakolon led Sarkis into the imperial pavilion. The youth nodded easily to the mage; Zaidas, having been around the palaces since before Katakolon was born, was familiar to him as the furniture. Sarkis sketched a salute, which Zaidas returned. They’d both prospered handsomely under Krispos; if either was jealous of the other, he hid it well.

“What’s toward, Your Majesty?” Sarkis said, and then, “Anything to eat in here? I’m peckish.”

Krispos pointed to a bowl of salted olives. The cavalry general picked up a handful of them and popped them into his mouth one after another, spitting the seeds on the ground. As soon as he finished his first helping, he took another.

“Here.” Krispos pointed to the map. “Some things occurred to me—late, perhaps, but better late than not at all. The trouble with this campaign is that the Thanasioi know just where we are. If they don’t want to meet us in the field, they don’t have to. They can just divide themselves up and raid endlessly: even if we smash some of their bands, we haven’t done anything to break the back of the movement.”

“Truth,” Sarkis mumbled around an olive. “It’s the curse of fighting folk who are only one step up from hill bandits. We move slow, with horns playing and banners waving, while they bounce over the landscape like fleas on a hot griddle. Belike they have spies in camp, too, to let them know right where we are at any hour of the day or night.”

“I’m sure they do,” Krispos said. “Here’s what I have in mind, then: suppose we detach, say, fifteen hundred men from this force, take ’em back to the coast, and put ’em on board ship. Don’t tell them where to land in advance; let the drungarios in charge of the fleet pick a coastal town—Tavas, Nakoleia, or Pityos—after they’ve set out. The detachment would be big enough to do us some good when it landed, maybe big enough to force Livanios to concentrate quickly against it…at which point, the good god willing, we’d be close enough to hit him with the rest of the army. Well?” He knew he was an amateur strategist, and wasn’t in the habit of giving orders for major moves till he’d talked them over with professionals.

Sarkis absently popped another olive into his mouth. “It would keep the spies from knowing what was going on, which I like. But you ought to pick out the target town in advance and give it to the drungarios as a sealed order—”

“Sealed magically, too,” Zaidas put in, “to prevent scrying as well as spying.”

“Aye, sealed magically, by all means,” Sarkis said. “No one would see the order save you and, say, one spatharios”—he glanced over at Katakolon—“until the drungarios opened it. That way you could make sure the main army was at the right place at the right time.”

“Thank you, eminent sir; you’ve closed a loophole. We’ll do it as you suggest. What I mostly want is to make the Thanasioi react to us for once instead of the other way round. Let them counter our mischief for a change.”

Krispos looked from Sarkis to Zaidas to Katakolon. They all nodded. His son asked, “Which town will you choose for the landing?”

Sarkis turned away from Katakolon so the youth would not see him smile. Krispos saw, though. Gently he answered, “I’m not going to tell you, because this tent just has cloth walls and I don’t know who’s walking by with his ear bent. The less we blab, the less there is for unfriendly people to learn from us.”

“Oh.” Katakolon still had trouble realizing this wasn’t a large, elaborate game. Then he said, “Couldn’t you have Zaidas create a zone of silence around the pavilion?”

“I could,” Krispos said. “But I won’t, because it’s far more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, another mage would be apt to notice the zone of silence and wonder what we were brewing up behind it. This way, everything stays nice and ordinary and no one suspects we have anything sneaky in mind—which is the best way to pull off something sneaky, assuming you want to.”

“Oh,” Katakolon said again.

W
ITHOUT WARNING, SYAGRIOS CAME THROUGH THE DOOR INTO
Phostis’ little cubicle in the keep at Etchmiadzin. “Get your imperial backside out of bed,” he growled. “You’ve got work to do.”

Phostis’ first muzzy thought on waking was relief that Olyvria wasn’t lying on the pallet beside him. His next, as his head cleared a little, was curiosity. “Work?” he said. “What kind of work?” He crawled out from under the blanket, stretched, and tried to pull wrinkles out of his tunic. He’d slept on his beard wrong; parts of it were sticking out from his face like spikes.

“Come down and get some wine and porridge in you and we’ll talk,” Syagrios said. “No point to telling you anything now—you don’t have any brains before breakfast.”

Since that was more or less true, Phostis answered it with as dignified a silence as he could muster. The dignity would have been easier to maintain had he not made a hash of buckling one sandal. Syagrios laughed raucously.

On the way downstairs, the ruffian asked, “How’s the arm?”

Phostis raised it and bent it at odd angles till he caught his breath at a sharp stab of pain. “It’s still not perfect, not by a long shot,” he answered, “but I’m getting to where I can use it well enough.”