The Tale of Krispos (22 page)

And soon enough, Krispos came to curse the fall rains, too. As Iakovitzes grew more able to care for himself, Krispos found himself with more free time. He wanted to spend as much time as he could with Tanilis, both for the sake of his body’s pleasure and, increasingly, to explore the boundaries of their odd relationship. Riding even as far as her villa, though, was not to be undertaken lightly, not in the fall.

Thus he was overjoyed, one cold blustery day when the rain threatened to turn to sleet, to hear her say, “I think I will go into Opsikion soon, to spend the winter there. I have a house, you know, not far from Phos’ temple.”

“I’d forgotten,” Krispos admitted. That night, in the privacy of the guest chamber, he said, “I hope I’ll be able to see you more often if you come to town. This miserable weather—”

Tanilis nodded. “I expect you will.”

“Did you—” Krispos paused, then plunged: “Did you decide to go into Opsikion partly on account of me?”

Her laugh was warm enough that, though he flushed, he did not flinch. “Don’t flatter yourself too much, my—well, if I call you my dear, you
will
flatter yourself, won’t you? In any case, I go into Opsikion every year about this time. Should anything important happen, I might not learn of it for weeks were I to stay here in the villa.”

“Oh.” Krispos thought for a moment. “Couldn’t you stay here and foresee what you need to know?”

“The gift comes as it will, not as I will,” Tanilis said. “Besides, I like to see new faces every so often. If I’d prayed at the chapel here, after all, instead of coming into Opsikion for the holy Abdaas’ day, I’d not have met you. You might have stayed a groom forever.”

Reminded of Iakovitzes’ jibe, Krispos said, “It’s an easier life than the one I had before I came to the city.” He also thought, a little angrily, that he would have risen further even if Tanilis hadn’t met him. That he kept to himself. Instead, he said, “If you come to Opsikion, you might want to bring that pretty little laundress of yours—Phronia’s her name, isn’t it?—along with you.”

“Oh? And why is that?” Tanilis’ voice held no expression whatever.

Krispos answered quickly, knowing he was on tricky ground. “Because I’ve spread the word around that she’s the reason I come here so often. If she’s in Opsikion, I’ll have a better excuse to visit you there.”

“Hmm. Put that way, yes.” Tanilis’ measuring gaze reminded Krispos of a hawk eyeing a rabbit from on high. “I would not advise you to use this story to deceive me while you carry on with Phronia. I would not advise that at all.”

A chill ran down Krispos’ spine, though he had no interest in Phronia past any young man’s regard for a pretty girl. Since that was true, the chill soon faded. What remained was insight into how Tanilis thought. Krispos’ imagination had not reached to concealing one falsehood within another, but Tanilis took the possibility for granted. That had to mean she’d seen it before, which in turn meant other people used such complex ploys.
Something else to look out for,
Krispos thought with a silent sigh.

“What was that for?” Tanilis asked.

Wishing she weren’t so alert, he said, “Only that you’ve taught me many things.”

“I’ve certainly intended to. If you would be more than a groom, you need to know more than a groom.”

Krispos nodded before the full import of what she’d said sank in. Then he found himself wondering whether she’d warned him about Phronia just to show him how a double bluff worked. He thought about asking her but decided not to. She might not have meant that at all. He smiled ruefully. Whatever else she was doing, she was teaching him to distrust first impressions…and second…and third…. After a while, he supposed, reality might disappear altogether, and no one would notice it was gone.

He thought of how Iakovitzes and Lexo had gone back and forth, quarreling over what was thought to be true at least as much as over what was true. To prosper in Videssos the city, he might need every bit of what Tanilis taught.

S
INCE OPSIKION LAY BY THE SAILORS’ SEA, KRISPOS THOUGHT
winter would be gentler there. The winter wind, though, was not off the sea, but from the north and west; a breeze from his old home, but hardly a welcome one.

Eventually the sea froze, thick enough for a man to walk on, out to a distance of several miles from shore. Even the folk of Opsikion called that a hard winter. To Krispos it was appalling; he’d seen frozen rivers and ponds aplenty, but the notion that the sea could turn to ice made him wonder if the Balancer heretics from Khatrish might not have a point. The broad, frigid expanse seemed a chunk of Skotos’ hell brought up to earth.

Yet the locals took the weather in stride. They told stories of the year an iceberg, perhaps storm-driven from Agder or the Haloga country, smashed half the docks before shattering against the town’s seawall. And the eparch Sisinnios sent armed patrols onto the ice north of the city.

“What are you looking for, demons?” Krispos asked when he saw the guardsmen set out one morning. He laughed nervously. If the frozen sea was as much Skotos’ country as it appeared, demons might indeed dwell there.

The patrol leader laughed, too. He thought Krispos had been joking. “Worse than demons,” he said, and gave Krispos a moment to stew before he finished: “Khatrishers.”

“In this weather?” Krispos wore a squirrelskin cap with earflaps. It was pulled down low on his forehead. A thick wool scarf covered his mouth and nose. The few square inches of skin between the one and the other had long since turned numb.

The patrol leader was similarly muffled. His breath made a steaming cloud around him. “Grab a spear and come see for yourself,” he urged. “You’re with the chap from the city, right? Well, you can tell him some of what we see around here.”

“Why not?” A quick trip back to the armory gave Krispos a spear and a white-painted shield. Soon he was stumbling along the icy surface of the sea with the troopers. It was rougher, more irregular ice than he’d expected, almost as if the waves had frozen instead of breaking.

“Always keep two men in sight,” said the patrol leader, whose name, Krispos learned, was Saborios. “You get lost out here by yourself—well, you’re already on the ice, so where will your soul end up?” Krispos blew out a smoky sigh of relief to discover he was not the only one who had heretical thoughts.

The guardsmen paid attention to what they were doing, but it was a routine attention, making sure they did nothing they knew to be foolish. It left plenty of room for banter and horseplay. Krispos trudged on grimly in the middle of the line. With neither terrain nor risks familiar to him, he had all he could do just to keep pace.

“Good thing it’s not snowing,” one of the troopers said. “If it was snowing, the Khatrishers could sneak an army past us and we’d never know the difference.”

“We would when we got back,” another answered. The first guard chuckled.

Everything looked the same to Krispos; sky and frozen sea and distant land all were shades of white and gray. Anything colorful, he thought, should have been visible for miles. What had not occurred to him was how uncolorful a smuggler could become.

Had the trooper to Krispos’ left not almost literally stumbled over the man, they never would have spied him. Even then, had he stayed still, he might have escaped notice: he wore white foxskins and, when still, was invisible past twenty paces. But he lost his head and tried to run. He was no better at it on the slippery ice than his pursuers, who soon ran him down.

Saborios held out a hand to the Khatrisher, who had gone so far as to daub white greasepaint on his beard and face. “You don’t by any chance have your import license along, do you?” the patrol leader asked pleasantly. The Khatrisher stood in glum silence. “No, eh?” Saborios said, almost as if really surprised. “Then let’s have your goods.”

The smuggler reached under his jacket, drew out a leather pouch.

The patrol leader opened it. “Amber, is it? Very fine, too. Did you give me all of it? Complete confiscation, you know, is the penalty for unlicensed import.”

“That’s everything, curse you,” the Khatrisher said sullenly.

“Good.” Saborios nodded his understanding. “Then you won’t mind Domentzios and Bonosos stripping you. If they find you’ve told the truth, they’ll even give you back your clothes.”

Krispos was shivering in his furs. He wondered how long a naked man would last on the ice. Not long enough to get off it again, he was sure. He watched the smuggler make the same unhappy calculation. The fellow took a pouch from each boot. The patrol leader pocketed them, then motioned forward the two troopers he had named. They were tugging off the Khatrisher’s coat when he exclaimed, “Wait!”

The imperials looked to the patrol leader, who nodded. The smuggler shed his white fox cap. “I need my knife, all right?” he said. Saborios nodded again. The smuggler cut into the lining, extracted yet another pouch. He threw down the dagger. “Now you can search me.”

The troopers did. They found nothing. Shivering and swearing, the Khatrisher dove back into his clothes. “You might have got that last one by us,” Saborios remarked.

“That’s what I thought,” the smuggler said through chattering teeth. “Then I thought I might not have, too.”

“Sensible,” Saborios said. “Well, let’s take you in. We’ve earned our pay for today, I think.”

“What will you do with him?” Krispos asked as the patrol turned back toward Opsikion.

“Hold him for ransom,” Saborios answered. “Nothing else we can do, now that I’ve seen he’s smuggling amber. Gumush will pay to have him back, never fear.” Krispos made a questioning noise. Saborios explained, “Amber’s a royal monopoly in Khatrish. The khagan likes to see if he can avoid paying our tariffs every so often, that’s all. This time he didn’t, so we get some for free.”

“Does he sneak in enough to make it worth his while?”

“That’s a sharp question—I thought you were Iakovitzes’ groom, not his bookkeeper. The only answer I know is, he must think so or he wouldn’t keep doing it. But not this run, though.” The patrol leader’s eyes, almost the only part of his face visible, narrowed in satisfaction.

Iakovitzes howled with glee when Krispos told him the story that evening. They were sitting much closer than usual to Bolkanes’ big fire; Krispos had a mug of hot spiced wine close at hand. He smiled gratefully when one of the barmaids refilled it. Iakovitzes said, “It’ll serve Gumush right. Nothing I enjoy more than a thief having to pay for his own thievery.”

“Won’t he just raise the price later on to make up for it?” Krispos asked. “The legitimate price, I mean.”

“Probably, probably,” Iakovitzes admitted. “But what do I care? I don’t much fancy amber. And no matter how hard he squeezes, the world doesn’t hold enough gold for him to buy his way out of embarrassment.” Contemplating someone else’s discomfiture would put Iakovitzes in a good mood if anything would.

A couple of nights later, Tanilis proved coldly furious that the amber had been seized. “I made the arrangements for it myself with Gumush,” she said. “Four parts in ten off the going rate here, which still allowed him a profit, seeing as the tariff is five parts in ten. He already has half the money, too. Do you suppose he’ll send it back when he ransoms his courier?” Her bitter laugh told how likely that was.

“But…” Krispos scratched his head. “The Avtokrator needs the money from the tariffs, to pay for soldiers and furs and roads and—”

“And courtesans and fine wines and fripperies,” Tanilis finished for him; she sounded as scornful of Anthimos III as Pyrrhos had. “But even if it were only as you say, I need money, too, for the good of my own estates. Why should I pay twice as much for amber as I need to for the sake of a handful of rich men in Videssos the city who do nothing for me?”

“Don’t they?” Krispos asked. “Seems to me I wouldn’t have come here with my master if the men in the city weren’t worried about the border with Khatrish. Or are you such a queen here that your peasants would have fought off the nomad horsemen on their own?” He recalled the Kubratoi descending on his vanished boyhood village as if it had happened only the day before.

Tanilis frowned. “No, I am no queen, so what you say has some truth. But the Avtokrator and Sevastokrator chose peace with Khatrish for their own reasons, not mine.”

Remembering Petronas’ ambitions against Makuran, Krispos knew she was right. But he said, “It works out the same for you either way, doesn’t it? If it does, you ought to be willing to pay for it.” He and his fellow villagers had been willing to pay anything within reason to prevent another invasion from Kubrat. Only the Empire’s demands reaching beyond reason had detached him from the land, and the rest of the villagers were there still.

“You speak well, and to the point,” Tanilis said. “I must confess, my loyalty is to my lands first, and to the Empire of Videssos only after that. What I say is true of most nobles, I think, almost all those away from Videssos the city. To us, the Empire seems more often to check our strength than to protect it, and so we evade demands from the capital as best we can.”

The more Krispos talked with Tanilis, the more complex his picture of the world grew. Back in his village, he’d thought of nobles as agents of the Empire and thanked Phos that the freeholders among whom he’d lived owed service to no lord. Yet Tanilis seemed no ally to the will of Videssos the city, but rather a rival. But she was no great friend of the peasants, either; she simply wanted to control them herself in place of the central government. Krispos tried to imagine how things looked from Petronas’ perspective. Maybe one day he’d ask the Sevastokrator—after all, he’d met him. He laughed a little, amused at his own presumption.

“What do you find funny?” Tanilis asked.

Krispos’ cheeks grew warm. Sometimes when he was with Tanilis, he felt he was a scroll she could unroll and read as she wished. Annoyed at himself for being so open, and sure he could not lie successfully, he explained.

She took him seriously. She always did; he had to give her that. Though he was certain he often seemed very young and raw to her, she went out of her way not to mock his enthusiasms, even if she let him see she did not share many of them. Even more than the sweet lure of her body, the respect she gave him made him want to spend time with her, in bed and out of it. He wondered if this was how love began.