The Tale of Krispos (120 page)

“Aye, we got one in the pursuit after I sent Barisbakourios to you,” Noetos said. “Shall we squeeze the Thanasiot cheese till the whey runs out of him?” A couple of his lieutenants were close by; they chuckled grimly at the rearguard commander’s truth in jest’s clothing.

“Presently, at need,” Krispos said. “Let’s see what magic can do with him first. Bring him here. I want to see him.”

Noetos called orders. Some of his troopers frogmarched a young man in peasant homespun into the Avtokrator’s presence. The captive must have taken a fall from his horse. His tunic was out at both elbows and over one knee; he was bloody in all three of those places and a couple of others, as well. Serum oozed down into one eye from a scrape on his forehead.

But he remained defiant. When one of the guards growled, “Down on your belly before his Majesty, wretch,” he bent his head, sure enough, but only to spit between his feet as if in rejection of Skotos. All the soldiers snarled then, and roughly forced him into a proskynesis in spite of his struggles.

“Haul him to his feet,” Krispos said, thinking the cavalrymen were likely to have done worse to their prisoner had they not been under his eye. When the ragged, battered youth—he might have been Evripos’ age, more likely Katakolon’s—was on his feet, Krispos asked him, “What have I done to you, that you treat me like the dark god?”

The prisoner worked his jaw, perhaps preparing to spit once more. “You don’t want to do that, sonny,” one of the troopers said.

The young man spat anyhow. Krispos let his captors shake him a little, but then raised a hand. “Hold on. I want this question answered as freely as may be, given what’s happened here. What have I done, to be hated so? We’ve been at peace most of the years since he was born; taxes are lower now than then. What does he have against me? What
do
you have against me, sirrah? You may as well speak your mind; the headsman’s shadow already falls across your fate.”

“You think I fear death?” the prisoner said. “By the good god, I laugh at death—it takes me out of this trap of Skotos, the world, and sends me on to Phos’ eternal light. Do your worst to me; that’s but for a moment. Then I shake free of the dung we call a body, like a butterfly bursting from its cocoon.”

His eyes blazed, though he kept blinking the one beneath the scrape. The last set of eyes Krispos had seen burning with such fanaticism had belonged to the priest Pyrrhos, first his benefactor, then his ecumenical patriarch, and at last such a ferocious and inflexible champion of orthodoxy that he’d had to be deposed.

Krispos said, “Very well, young fellow”—he realized he was speaking as if to one of his sons who’d been foolish—“you despise the world. Why do you despise my place in it?”

“Because you’re rich, and wallow in your gold like a hog in mud,” the young Thanasiot answered. “Because you choose the material over the spiritual, and give over your soul to Skotos in the process.”

“Here, you speak to his Majesty with respect, or it’ll go the harder for you,” one of the cavalrymen growled. The prisoner spat on the ground again. His captor backhanded him across the face. Blood started from the corner of his mouth.

“Enough of that,” Krispos said. “He’ll be one of many who feel that way. He’s eaten up bad doctrine and sickened on it.”

“Liar!” the young man shouted, careless of his own fate. “You’re the one with false teachings poisoning your mind. Abandon the world and the things of the world for the true and lasting life, the one yet to come.” He could not raise his arms, but lifted his eyes to the heavens. “We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind—”

Hearing the heretic pray to the good god with the identical words he himself used, Krispos wondered for a moment if the fellow could be right. Pyrrhos, in his day, might have come close to saying yes, but not even the rigorously ascetic Pyrrhos could have countenanced destroying all the things of this world for the sake of the afterlife. How were men and women to live and raise families if they wrecked their farms or shops, abandoned parents or children?

He put the question to the prisoner: “If you Thanasioi had your way, wouldn’t you soonest let mankind die out in a single generation’s time, so no one would be left alive to commit any sins?”

“Aye, that’s so,” the youth answered. “It won’t be so simple; we know that—most folk are too cowardly, too much in love with materialism—”

“By which it sounds as if you mean a full belly and a roof over one’s head,” Krispos broke in.

“Anything that ties you to the world is evil, is from Skotos,” the prisoner insisted. “The purest among us stop taking food and let themselves starve, the better to join Phos as soon as they may.”

Krispos believed him. That streak of fanatic asceticism ran deep in many Videssians, whether orthodox or heretic. The Thanasioi, though, seemed to have found a way to channel that religious energy to their own ends, perhaps more effectively than the comfortable clergy who came from Videssos the city.

“Me, I aim to live in this world as long and as well as I can,” the Avtokrator said. The Thanasiot laughed scornfully. Krispos did not care. Having known privation in his youth, he saw no point to embracing it when he did not have to. He turned to the men who had hold of the youngster. “Tie him onto a horse. Don’t let him escape or harm himself. When we encamp tonight, I’ll have Zaidas the wizard question him. And if magic doesn’t get me what I need to know…”

The guards nodded. The young heretic just glared. Krispos wondered how long that defiance would last if confronted with fire and barbed iron. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

Late in the afternoon, the Thanasioi again tried to raid the imperial army. A courier carried a dripping head back to Krispos. His stomach lurched; the hacking was as crude as that of any farmer who slaughtered a pig, while the iron smell of fresh blood also brought back memories of butchering.

If the courier had any such memories, they didn’t bother him. Grinning, he said, “We drove the whoresons off, Your Majesty—spreading us wider was a fine plan. Junior here, he didn’t run fast enough.”

“Good,” Krispos said, trying not to meet Junior’s sightless eyes. He dug in the pouch at his belt and tossed the courier a goldpiece. “This is for the good news.”

“Phos bless you, majesty,” the fellow exclaimed. “Shall we put this lad on a pike and carry him ahead of us for a standard?”

“No,” Krispos said with a shudder. An army that seemed bent on wanton killing would be just what the countryside needed to throw it into the rebels’ camp. Controlling his features as best he could, the Avtokrator went on, “Bury it or toss it in a ditch or do whatever you please, as long as you don’t display it. We want the people to know we’ve come to root out the heretics, not to glory in gore.”

“However you’d have it, Your Majesty,” the courier said cheerfully. He rode off happy enough with his reward, even though the Emperor had turned down the suggestion he’d made. Krispos knew some Avtokrators—not the worst of rulers Videssos had ever had, either—would have taken him up on it, or had the idea for themselves. But he did not have the stomach for it.

After the army made camp, he went over to Zaidas’ pavilion. He found the Thanasiot prisoner tied to a folding chair and the mage looking frustrated. Zaidas gestured to the apparatus he’d set up. “You are familiar with the two-mirror spell for determining truth, Your Majesty?”

“I’ve seen it used, yes,” Krispos answered. “Why? Are you having trouble with it?”

“That would be putting it mildly. It yields me nothing—nothing, do you hear?” Normally among the gentlest of men, Zaidas looked ready to tear the answer to his failure out of the prisoner with red-hot pincers.

“Can it be shielded against?” Krispos asked.

“Obviously it can.” Zaidas gave the Thanasiot another glare before continuing. “This I knew before. But I never thought to find such shielding on a fleabitten trooper like this. If all the rebels are warded in like fashion, interrogation will become less certain and more bloody.”

“The good god’s truth armors me,” the young captive declared. He sounded proud, as if he failed to realize his immunity would only cause him to be given over to torment.

“Any chance he’s telling the truth?” Krispos asked.

Zaidas made a scornful noise, then suddenly turned thoughtful. “Maybe his fanaticism does afford some protection,” the mage said. “One of the reasons sorcery so often fails in battle is that men at a high pitch of excitement are less vulnerable to its effects. Fervent belief in the righteousness of his cause may raise this fellow to a similar, less vulnerable, plane.”

“Can you learn whether this is so?”

“It would take some time.” Zaidas pursed his lips and seemed on the point of retreating into one of his brown studies.

Krispos forestalled him. Whenever magic touched the Thanasioi, something went wrong. Zaidas hadn’t been able to learn where the heretics had taken Phostis—whose absence, unexpectedly, was an ache that only the endless work of the campaign held at bay—he hadn’t been able to learn
why
he couldn’t learn that, and now he couldn’t even squeeze truth from an ordinary prisoner. To him, that made the young Thanasiot an intriguing challenge. To Krispos, it made the rebel an obstacle to be crushed, since he would not yield to gentler methods.

Harshly the Avtokrator said, “Let the men in red leather have him.” Interrogators who used no magic wore red to hide the stains of their trade.

In his youth, Krispos would have been slower to give that order. He knew his years on the throne—and his desire to remain there for more years—had hardened him; even corrupted might not have been too strong a word. But he was also introspective enough to recognize that hardening and resist it save in times of dire need. This, he judged, was one of those times.

The Thanasiot’s shrieks kept him awake long into the night. He was a ruler who did what he thought he had to do; he was no monster. Some time past midnight, he downed a beaker of wine and let the grape put a blurry curtain between him and the screaming. At last he slept.

Chapter
V

A
FTER A LIFETIME SPENT WITHIN HEARING OF THE SEA
, Phostis found the hill country he traveled through strange in more ways than he could count. The moaning wind sounded wrong. It even smelled wrong, carrying the odors of dirt and smoke and livestock, but not the salt tang he’d never noticed till he met it no more.

Instead of being able to look out from a tall window and see far across blue water, he now found his horizon limited to a few hundred yards of gray rock, gray-brown dirt, and gray-green brush. The wagon in which he rode bumped along over winding trails so narrow he wouldn’t have thought a horse able to use them, let alone a vehicle with wheels.

And, of course, no one had ever used him as Syagtios and Olyvria did now. All through his life, people had jumped to obey, even to anticipate, his every whim. The only exceptions he’d known were his father, his mother when she was alive, and his brothers—and, being the eldest, he was pretty good at getting his way with Evripos and Katakolon. That a rebel officer’s daughter and a ruffian could not only disobey him but give orders themselves had never crossed his mind, even in nightmare.

That they could do anything else had never crossed their minds. As the road took another of its innumerable twists, Syagrios said, “Down flat, you. Anybody who sees you is likely to be one of us, but ain’t nobody gets old on ‘likely.’”

Phostis scrambled down into the wagon bed. The first time Syagrios told him to do that, he’d balked—whereupon Syagrios clouted him. He couldn’t jump out of the wagon and run; a stout rope bound his ankle to a post. He could stand up and yell for help, but as Syagrios had said, most of the people hereabouts were themselves Thanasioi.

Syagrios had said something else, too, when he tried to disobey: “Listen, boy, you may think you can pop up like a spring toy and get us killed. You may even be right. But you better think about this, too: I promise you won’t be around to see our heads go up on the Milestone.”

Was he bluffing? Phostis didn’t think so. A couple of times, other wagons or horsemen had trotted past, but he’d lain quiet. Most of the times he was ordered into the wagon bed, as now, no one came round the blind corner. After a minute or two, Syagrios said, “All right, kid, you can come back up.”

Phostis returned to his place between the burly driver and Olyvria. He said, “Where are you taking me, anyhow?”

He’d asked that question ever since he was kidnapped. As usual, Olyvria answered, “What you don’t know, you can’t tell if you’re lucky enough to get away.” She brushed back a curl that had slipped out to tickle her cheek. “If you decide you want to try to get away, that is.”

“I might be less inclined to, if you’d trust me more,” he said. In his theology he was not far from the Thanasioi. But he had a hard time loving people who’d drugged, kidnapped, beaten, and imprisoned him. He considered that from a theological point of view. Should he not approve of them for removing him from the obscenely comfortable world in which he’d dwelt?

No. Maybe he was imperfectly religious, but he still thought of those who tormented him as his enemies.

Olyvria said, “I’m not the one who can decide whether you’re to be trusted. My father will do that when you come before him.”

“When will that be?” Phostis asked for at least the dozenth time.

Syagrios answered before Olyvria could: “Whenever it is. You ask too bloody many questions, you know that?”

Phostis maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence. He feared hope outran reality. Dignity came easily when backed up with embroidered robes, unquestioned authority, and a fancy palace with scores of servants. It was harder to bring off for someone in a threadbare tunic with a rope round his ankle, and harder still when a few days before he’d fouled himself while in the power of the people he was trying to impress.

The wagon rattled around another bend, which meant Phostis spent more time hiding—or was the proper expression
being hidden
? Even his grammar tutor would have had trouble deciding that—in the back of the wagon. This time, though, Syagrios grunted in satisfaction when the corner was safely turned; Olyvria softly clapped her hands together.

“Come on up, you,” Syagrios said. “We’re just about there.” Although he couldn’t smell the sea, Phostis still thought
there
would be the port of Pityos. He’d never seen Pityos, but imagined it to be something on the order of Nakoleia, though likely even smaller and dingier.

The town ahead was smaller and dingier that Nakoleia, but there its resemblance to Phostis’ imaginings ceased. It was no port at all, just a huddle of houses and shops in a valley a little wider than most. A stout fortress with walls of forbidding gray limestone dominated the skyline as thoroughly as did the High Temple in Videssos the city.

“What
is
this place?” Phostis asked. He regretted his tone at once; he’d plainly implied the town was unfit for human habitation. As a matter of fact, that was his opinion—how could anyone want to live out his life trapped in a single valley? And how could anyone trapped in a single valley have a life worth living? But letting his captors know what he thought seemed less than clever.

Syagrios and Olyvria looked at each other across him. When she spoke, it was to her comrade: “He’ll find out anyhow.” Only when Syagrios reluctantly nodded did she answer Phostis: “The name of this town is Etchmiadzin.”

For a moment, he thought she’d sneezed. Then he said, “It sounds like a Vaspurakaner name.”

“It is,” Olyvria said. “We’re hard by the border here, and a fair number of princes still call this town home. More to the point, though, Etchmiadzin is where the pious and holy Thanasios first preached, and the chief center of those who follow his way.”

If Etchmiadzin was the chief center of the Thanasioi, Phostis was glad his kidnappers hadn’t taken him to some outlying hamlet. Back at Videssos the city, he would have blurted out that thought, had it occurred to him. His friends and hangers-on—sometimes it was hard to tell the one group from the other—would have bawled laughter, probably drunken laughter, too. In his present circumstances, silence again seemed the smarter course.

The people of Etchmiadzin went stolidly about their business, taking no notice of the incognito arrival in their midst of a junior Avtokrator. As Olyvria had said, a good many of them seemed to be of Vaspurakaner blood, broader-shouldered and thicker-chested than their Videssian neighbors. An old Vaspurakaner priest, his robe of different cut and a darker blue than those orthodox clerics wore, stumped down an unpaved street, leaning on a stick.

The men on guard outside the fortress were about as far removed from the Halogai in the gilded mail shirts as was possible while still retaining the name of soldier. Not one fighter’s kit matched his comrade’s; the guards leaned and slouched at every angle save the perpendicular. But Phostis had seen the measuring stare in these wolves’ eyes on the faces of the northern men in the capital as they sized up some new arrival at the palaces.

As soon as the guards recognized Syagrios and Olyvria, though, they came to excited life, whooping, cheering, and pounding one another on the back. “By the good god, you did nab the little bugger!” one of them yelled, pointing toward Phostis. As a form of address, that hit a new low.

“Inform my father that he’s here, if you would, friends,” Olyvria said; from her lips, as from Digenis’, the greeting of the Thanasioi came fresh and sincere.

The rough men hurried to do her bidding. Syagrios reined in and alighted from the wagon. “Give me your foot,” he told Phostis. “You ain’t gonna run away from here.” As if reading his captive’s mind, he added, “If you try to kick me in the face, boy, I won’t just beat you. I’ll stomp you so hard you won’t breathe without hurting for the next year. You believe me?”

Phostis did, as fully as he believed in the lord with the great and good mind, not least because Syagrios looked achingly eager to do as he’d threatened. So the heir to the imperial throne sat quietly while the driver cut through the rope. Perhaps he and Syagrios shared the Thanasiot theology. That would never make them friends. Phostis had made orthodox enemies when orthodox himself; he saw no reason why one Thanasiot should not despise another as a man, even if they held to the same dogmas.

The guards came straggling back, one a few paces behind the other. The fellow who got back to his post first waved to usher Olyvria, Syagrios, and even Phostis into the fortress. Syagrios shoved Phostis forward, none too gently. “Get moving, you.”

He got moving. More soldiers—no, warriors was probably a better word for them, as they had ferocity but seemed without discipline—traded strokes or shot at propped-up bales of hay or simply sat around and chattered in the inner ward. They waved to Syagrios, nodded respectfully to Olyvria, and paid Phostis no attention whatever. In his plain, cheap tunic, he did not look as if he deserved attention.

The iron-fronted door to the keep was open. Propelled by another shove from Syagrios, Phostis plunged into gloom. He stumbled, not sure where he was going and even less sure of his footing. Olyvria murmured, “Turn left at the first opening.”

He obeyed gratefully. Only when he was inside the chamber did he think to wonder if Syagrios was really as harsh and Olyvria as kindly as they appeared to be. Snapping him back and forth between them like a ball thrown in a bathhouse struck him as a good way to weaken whatever resolve he had left.

“Come in, young Majesty, come in!” exclaimed the slim little man sitting in a high-backed chair at the far end of the chamber. So this was Livanios, then. He sounded as cordial as if he and Phostis were old friends, not captor and captive. The smile on his face was warm and inviting—was, in fact, Olyvria’s smile set in a face framed by a neat, graying beard and marred from a couple of sword cuts. It made Phostis want to trust him—and made him want to distrust himself on account of that.

The chamber itself had been set up to imitate, as closely as was possible in the keep of a fortress in the middle of the back of beyond, the Grand Courtroom in the palace compound back at Videssos the city. To someone who had never seen the real Grand Courtroom, it might have been impressive. Phostis, who’d grown up there, found it ludicrous. Where was the marble double colonnade that led the eye to the distant throne? Where were the elegant and richly clad courtiers who took their place along the way to the Emperor? The handful of rudely staring soldiers made a poor substitute. Nor were the ragged priest and the nondescript fellow in a striped caftan adequate replacements for the ecumenical patriarch and the lofty Sevastos who stood before the Avtokrator’s high seat.

Phostis knew a weird mental shift as he reminded himself he’d come to despise the pomp and ostentation that surrounded his father. He also wondered why the leader of the radically egalitarian Thanasioi wanted to mimic that pomp.

He had, however, bigger worries. Livanios brought them into sudden sharp focus, saying, “So how much will your father give to have you back. I don’t mean gold; we of the gleaming path despise gold. But surely he will yield land and influence to restore you to his side.”

“Will he? I wonder.” Phostis’ bitterness was not altogether feigned. “We’ve always quarreled, my father and I. For all I know, he’s glad to have me gone. Why not? He has two other sons, both of them more to his liking.”

“You undervalue yourself in his eyes,” Livanios said. “He’s turned the countryside around the imperial army upside down searching for you.”

“He searches sorcerously as well, and with the same determination,” the man in the caftan said. His Videssian held a vanishing trace of accent.

Phostis shrugged. Maybe what he heard was true, maybe not. Either way, it mattered little. He said, “Besides, what makes you think I want to go back to my father? By all I’ve heard of you Thanasioi, I’d sooner live out my days with you than smother myself in things back at the palace.”

He didn’t know whether he was telling the truth, telling part of the truth, or flat-out lying. The doctrines of the Thanasioi drew him powerfully. Of so much he was sure. But would men who observed all those fine-sounding principles stoop to something so sordid as kidnapping? Maybe they would, if their faith let them pretend to be orthodox to preserve themselves. If so, they were the best actors he’d ever run across. They even fooled him.

Livanios said, “I’ve heard somewhat of this from my daughter and the holy Digenis both. The possibilities are…interesting. You’d truly rather live out your days in the want that is our lot than in the luxury you’ve always known?”

“I fear more for my soul than for my body,” Phostis said. “My body is but a garment that will wear out all too soon. When it’s tossed on the midden, what difference if it once was stained with fancy dyes? My soul, though—my soul goes on forever.” He sketched Phos’ sun-sign above his breast.

Livanios, the priest, Olyvria, even Syagrios also traced quick circles. The man in the caftan did not. Phostis wondered about that. An imperfectly pious Thanasiot struck him as a contradiction in terms. Or perhaps not—that label fit him pretty well. Was he claiming more belief than he really felt to get Livanios to treat him mildly? He had trouble reading his own heart.