The Tale of Krispos (125 page)

He landed heavily, staggering. One of the guardsmen grabbed his arm and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said. His heart pounded, his breath came quick. A run and a jump—was that exerting himself? When he first took the throne, he’d have laughed at the idea. Now it seemed less funny. He shrugged. The only alternative to getting older was
not
getting any older. This wasn’t perfect, but it was better.

A couple of bonfires over, a young man stooped to ignite a torch. He waved it over his head. Sparks flew through the night. The young man weaved among slower-moving people in the square. Still waving his torch, he shouted, “The gleaming path! Phos bless the gleaming path!”

For a moment, the cry did not register with Krispos. Then he stopped in midstride, stared, and pointed toward the young man. “That is a Thanasiot. Arrest him!”

Thinking back afterward, he realized he could have handled things better. Some of his guards dashed after the Thanasiot. So did some people in the crowd. Others, mistaking Krispos’ target, chased the wrong man—several wrong men—and got in the way of those pursuing the right one. Shouts and fistfights erupted.

The young heretic kept right on running and kept right on chanting the Thanasiot war cry. To Krispos’ horror, he cast his torch into one of the wood-and-canvas market stalls that were closed for the Midwinter’s Day celebration. Flames clung and began to grow.

All at once Krispos, a lump of ice in his belly, wished the holiday had seen a blizzard or, better yet, a driving rainstorm.
Rain in the westlands when I didn’t want it,
he thought wildly,
but none now when I can really use it.
The weather was not playing fair.

Neither were the Thanasioi. That first arsonist, no longer obvious for what he was as soon as he’d thrown his torch, vanished into the crowd. But others of his kind dashed here and there, waving torches and yelling acclaim for the gleaming path. In fewer than half a dozen minutes, more than half a dozen fires began to burn.

The people in the plaza of Palamas surged like the sea in storm, some toward the blazes but many more away from them. Fire in Videssos the city—fire in any town—was a great terror, for the means of fighting it were so pitifully few. Great fires, with winds whipping walls of flame ahead of them, had slain thousands and burned out whole quarters of the city. Most of those—all of them, as far as Krispos knew—sprang from lightning or accident. To use fire in a city—in
the
city—as a weapon…Krispos shivered. The Thanasioi were not playing fair, either.

He tried to pull himself together. “Bucket and siphon men!” he yelled to one of the chamberlain. “Fetch them on the double!”

“Aye, Your Majesty.” The eunuch pelted into the palace compound. A company of firemen was stationed there, attached to the imperial guards. Several other companies had bases in other parts of the city. They were brave, they were skilled, they were even useful if they could get to a fire before it went wild. But if the Thanasioi were throwing torches around in the Forum of the Ox as well as the plaza of Palamas, and in the coppersmiths’ district, and over by the High Temple, some of those blazes would surely get loose.

Krispos shouted, “Twenty goldpieces for every arsonist slain, fifty for every one taken alive!” With luck, the price differential would keep cutthroats from murdering innocent bystanders and then claiming a reward.

“Will you retire to the palaces, Your Majesty?” Barsymes asked.

“No.” Krispos saw he’d surprised the vestiarios. He explained, “I want to be seen fighting this madness. I’ll do it from the plaza here.”

“As you say, Your Majesty,” Barsymes answered in the peculiarly toneless voice he used when he thought Krispos was making a mistake.

Before long, Krispos, too, wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. Messengers who ran to the palaces didn’t find him there. Because of that, he learned later than he should have that not only arson but also full-scale rioting had broken out in some of the poorer districts of the city. The two went hand in hand in every Avtokrator’s nightmares: arson might leave him without a capital to rule, while riots could keep him from ruling at all.

But setting up his headquarters out where the people could see him had advantages, too. Not only did he shout for men to form a bucket brigade from the nearest fountain, he pitched in and passed buckets himself. “This is my city as well as yours,” he told anyone who would listen. “We all have to work together to save it if we can.”

For a while, that looked anything but certain. A bucket brigade was hopelessly inadequate to put out a fire once it got going. Even if some excited citizens didn’t know that much, Krispos did. At his direction, the fellows at the far end of the brigade concentrated on wetting down the buildings and market stalls around the growing blaze to try to keep it from spreading.

He was beginning to think even that would be beyond their power when someone yelled, “Here’s the fire company!”

“Oh, Phos be praised,” Krispos panted. Already his shoulders ached from unaccustomed exertion; tomorrow, he suspected, he would be stiff and sore all over. Well, he’d worry about that tomorrow. Tonight, fighting the fire counted for more. He silently thanked the good god that, while he’d put on weight since he came to the throne, he hadn’t got so fat as to kill himself if he had to do physical labor.

Instead of a hand bucket, the fire crew carried a great wooden tub on poles like those of a sedan chair. They filled it at the fountain, then—with shouts of “Gangway!”—dashed to the fire. Instead of dumping the big bucket on the blaze, two of the men worked a hand pump mounted in the bucket, while a third directed the stream of water that issued from the nozzle of an oiled canvas hose.

The bucket brigade shifted its efforts to keeping the tub full. Even so, it emptied faster than they could pour water into it. The firemen snatched it up by its cradle, filled it at the fountain again, then lugged it back with much swearing and grunting. The pumpers worked like men possessed; the fellow at the hose, a gray-haired veteran named Thokyodes, played his stream right at the heart of the blaze.

That second tubful began to give the fire company the upper hand. The blaze had eaten two or three stalls and damaged a couple of others, but it would not turn into a conflagration. Thokyodes came over to Krispos and greeted him with a crisp military salute, clenched fist over heart. “You called us in good time, Your Majesty. We’ve managed to save this lot.”

“Not the first service you’ve done the city—or me,” Krispos answered; Thokyodes had served on the fire crews for longer than Krispos had been Emperor. “I wish I could tell you to stand easy the rest of the night, but I fear we’ll have more fires set.”

“Ah, well, Midwinter’s Day is always a nervous time for us.” Thokyodes stopped, staring at the Avtokrator. “Set, did you say? This wasn’t just one of the bonfires’ blowing embers that caught?”

“I wish it had been,” Krispos said. “But no, no such luck. The Thanasioi are raising riot, and when they riot, they seem to like to burn, too. The less anyone has, the better they’re pleased.”

Thokyodes made a horrible face. “They’re fornicating crazy, begging your pardon, Your Majesty. Those bastards ever see anybody who’s burned to death? They ever smelled a burned corpse? They ever try rebuilding what’s been burned down?”

“I don’t think they care about any of that. All they want is to get out of the material world as fast as they can.”

“Send ’em on to me, then,” Thokyodes growled. He carried a hatchet at his belt, to break down a wall so he could use his siphon or break through a door if he needed to effect a rescue. Now he grabbed the oak handle as if he had something else in mind for the tool. “Aye, I’ll send ’em on to the ice real soon, I will, by the good god. Start their own fires, will they?” Like any fireman, he had a fierce, roaring hatred for arsonists of any sort, religious or secular.

A messenger came up to Krispos. Blood ran down his face from a scalp wound. When Krispos exclaimed over it, the man shook off his concern. “I’ll live, Your Majesty. The rock glanced off, and my father always told me I had a hard head. Glad the old man was right. But I’m here to tell you it’s getting worse than just riots in the poor part of town south of Middle Street. It’s regular war—they’re fighting with everything they have. Not just rocks like what got me, but bows and shortswords and I don’t know what all else.”

“Do you know where the barracks are in the palace compound, and can you get there without falling over?” Krispos asked. When he got nods to both questions, he went on, “Rout out Noetos’ regiment of regulars. If the Thanasioi want to pretend they’re soldiers, let’s see how well they do facing soldiers instead of the city watch.”

“Aye, Your Majesty,” the messenger said. “You ought to send some priests out, too, for the heretics have one at their head, leather-lunged blue-robe name of—I think—Digenis.”

Krispos frowned; while he knew he’d heard the name before, he needed a little while to place it. When he did, he snarled something that made the messenger’s eyes widen. “That’s the blue-robe Phostis fell in love with before he got kidnapped,” he ground out. “If he’s a Thanasiot—”

He stopped. If Digenis was a Thanasiot, did that mean Phostis had joined the heresy, too? Thinking so appalled Krispos, but he also realized that just about everything he did appalled Phostis, if for no other reason than because he did it. And if his eldest had become a Thanasiot, had he really been kidnapped at all? Or had he run off to join the rebels of his own free will?

One way or another, Krispos had to have answers. He said, “Pass the word—a hundred goldpieces for this Digenis alive, and may the lord with the great and good mind have mercy on anyone who slays him, for I’ll have none.”

“I’ll make your wishes—your commands—known, Your Majesty.” The messenger took off at a dead run.

Krispos had no time to brood on the fellow’s news; two men dashed into the plaza of Palamas from different directions, each screaming “Fire!” at the top of his lungs. “Thokyodes!” Krispos yelled. The veteran asked both panicky men a few sharp questions, decided whose plight was more urgent, and went off with that fellow. The other man stamped his feet and looked about ready to burst. Krispos hoped he wouldn’t lose all that he owned by the time the fire company got back.

A bitterly cold wind began to blow out of the northwest, the direction from which the winter storms came. Krispos would have welcomed one of those storms, but bright stars glittered in a blue-black sky. No storm tonight; maybe, he thought, tasting the wind, no storm tomorrow, either. Of course not. He needed one.

Some of the palace servitors scurried about the plaza of Palamas, setting up awnings to protect him from whatever weather might come. Since he’d decided to make his headquarters here, the servants would see that he had such comforts as they could provide. Barsymes eyed him, daring him to make something of it. He kept quiet.

Along with the servitors, people of every sort swarmed through the plaza—soldiers, messengers, firemen, and revelers determined to celebrate Midwinter’s Day as they pleased no matter what was going on around them. The skinny fellow in the dark tunic didn’t look the least out of place as he worked his way up to Krispos. When he got to within a couple of paces of the Avtokrator, he pulled out a dagger and screamed, “Phos bless the gleaming path!”

He stabbed overhand, which was less than wise. Krispos threw up a hand and caught the fellow’s wrist before the knife struck home. The would-be assassin twisted and tried to break free, screaming all the while about the gleaming path. But Krispos had learned to wrestle from an army veteran about the time his beard began to sprout, and he had gained his first fame in Videssos the city by outgrappling a Kubrati champion. Shouting and twisting were not nearly enough to break away from him.

He bore the knifeman to the cobbles, squeezing hard on the tendons inside his wrist. Involuntarily, the Thanasiot’s hand opened. When the knife fell out, the fellow tried to roll and grab for it. Krispos brought up a knee, hard, between his legs. It was unsporting but extremely effective. The fellow stopped screaming about the gleaming path and started screaming in good earnest.

A Haloga’s axe came down with a meaty
thunk.
The screams rose to a brief high note, then stopped. Krispos scrambled to his feet to keep his robes from soaking up the quickly spreading pool of blood.

“I’d like to have asked him some questions,” he said mildly.

“Honh!” the bodyguard answered, a northern exclamation full of contempt. “He attacked you, Your Majesty; he did not deserve to live, even for a moment.”

“All right, Trygve,” Krispos said. If he criticized the northerner too harshly, Trygve was liable to decide the knifeman had managed to come so close to the Emperor because of his own failing, and slay himself to make up for it. The Halogai were wonderful guards, but they had to be handled very differently from Videssians. Krispos had spent twenty years groping toward an understanding of their gloomy pride; given another twenty, he thought he might come close.

Thokyodes and his fire company returned to the plaza of Palamas. The fellow whose earlier plea they’d rejected fell on them like a starving bear. Without so much as a chance to draw breath, they hurried away in his wake. Krispos wondered if they’d find anything left to save.

From out of the palace complex, their armor clashing about them, marched the troops who had served as Krispos’ rear guard in the ill-fated western campaign. They looked angry, first at being confined to barracks on Midwinter’s Day and then at getting called out not to celebrate but to fight. As they grimly tramped through the plaza of Palamas, Krispos reflected that he wouldn’t have cared to get in their way this evening.

A few minutes later, the noise floating into the square from the rest of the city suddenly redoubled. It did not sound like happy noise. Happy was the grunt that came from Trygve’s throat. “Your soldiers, they go breaking heads.” To him, the prospect seemed blissful.

Krispos watched the stars wheel slowly across the sky. He caught himself yawning. Though he was far more likely than most Videssians to stay up well into the night—who, after all, could better afford candles than the Avtokrator?—he still went to bed early by choice. Well, tonight he had no choice.