The Tale of Krispos (3 page)

“No, Tatze, we just got there,” his father answered. “If you doubt it, wait till you see how busy we’re going to be.” He yawned again. “Tomorrow.”

L
IFE ON A FARM IS NEVER EASY. OVER THE NEXT WEEKS AND
months, Krispos found out just how hard it could be. If he was not gathering straw for his father to bind into yealms and put up on the roof to repair the thatch, then he was fetching clay from the streambank to mix with roots and more straw and goat hair and dung to make daub to patch the walls.

Making and slapping on the daub was at least fun. He had the chance to get filthy while doing just what his parents told him. He carried more clay for his mother to shape into a baking oven. Like the one back at his old village, it looked like a beehive.

He spent a lot of time with his mother and little sister, working in the vegetable plots close by the houses. Except for the few still kept up by the handful of people here before the newcomers arrived, those had been allowed to run down. He and Evdokia weeded until their hands blistered, then kept right on. They plucked bugs and snails from the beans and cabbages, the onions and vetch, the beets and turnips. Krispos yelled and screamed and jumped up and down to scare away marauding crows and sparrows and starlings. That was fun, too.

He also kept the village chickens and ducks away from the vegetables. Soon his father got a couple of laying hens by doing some timber cutting for one of the established villagers. Krispos took care of them, too, and spread their manure over the vegetables.

He did more scarecrow duty out in the fields of wheat and oats and barley, along with the rest of the children. With more new arrivals than boys and girls born in the village, that time in the fields was also a time of testing, to see who was strong and who was clever. Krispos held his own and then some; even boys who had two more summers than he did soon learned to give him a wide berth.

He managed to find time for mischief. Roukhas never figured out who put the rotten egg under the straw, right where he liked to lay his head. The farmer and his family did sleep outdoors for the next two days, until their house aired out enough to be livable again. And Evdokia ran calling for her mother one day when she came back from washing herself in the stream and found her clothes moving by themselves.

Unlike Roukhas, Tatze had no trouble deducing how the toad had got into Evdokia’s shift. Krispos slept on his stomach that night.

Helping one of the slower newcomers get his roof into shape for the approaching fall rains earned Krispos’ father a piglet—and Krispos the job of looking after it. “It’s a sow, too,” his father said with some satisfaction. “Next year we’ll breed it and have plenty of pigs of our own.” Krispos looked forward to pork stew and ham and bacon—but not to more pig-tending.

Sheep the village also had, a small flock owned in common, more for wool than for meat. With so many people arriving with only the clothes on their backs, the sheep were sheared a second time that year, and the lambs, too. Krispos’ mother spent a while each evening spinning thread and she began to teach Evdokia the art. She set up a loom between two forked posts outside the house, so she could turn the spun yarn into cloth.

There were no cattle. The Kubratoi kept them all. Cattle, in Kubrat, were wealth, almost like gold. A pair of donkeys plowed for the villagers instead of oxen.

Krispos’ father fretted over that, saying, “Oxen have horns to attach the yoke to, but with donkeys you have to fasten it round their necks, so they choke if they pull hard against it.” But Roukhas showed him the special donkey-collars they had, modeled after the ones the Kubratoi used for the horses that pulled their yurts. He came away from the demonstration impressed. “Who would have thought the barbarians could come up with something so useful?”

What they had not come up with was any way to make grapes grow north of the mountains. Everyone ate apples and pears, instead, and drank beer. The newcomers never stopped grumbling about that, though some of the beer had honey added to it so it was almost as sweet as wine.

Not having grapes made life different in small ways as well as large. One day Krispos’ father brought home a couple of rabbits he had killed in the field. His mother chopped the meat fine, spiced it with garlic—and then stopped short. “How can I stuff it into grape leaves if there aren’t any grape leaves?” She sounded more upset at not being able to cook what she wanted than she had over being uprooted and forced to trek to Kubrat; it made the uprooting hit home.

Phostis patted her on the shoulder, turned to his son. “Run over to Roukhas’ house and find out what Ivera uses in place of grape leaves. Quick, now!”

Krispos soon came scampering back. “Cabbage,” he announced importantly.

“It won’t be the same,” his mother said. It wasn’t, but Krispos thought it was good.

Harvest came sooner than it would have in the warmer south. The grown men cut first the barley, then the oats and wheat, going through the fields with sickles. Krispos and the rest of the children followed to pick up the grains that fell to the ground. Most went into the sacks they carried; a few they ate. And after the grain was gathered, the men went through the fields again, cutting down the golden straw and tying it into sheaves. Then the children, two to a sheaf, dragged it back to the village. Finally, the men and women hauled buckets of dung from the middens to manure the ground for the next planting.

Once the grain was harvested, it was time to pick the beans and to chop down the plants so they could be fed to the pigs. And then, with the grain and beans in deep storage pits—except for some of the barley, which was set aside for brewing—the whole village seemed to take a deep breath.

“I was worried, when we came here, whether we’d be able to grow enough to get all of us through the winter,” Krispos’ father said one evening, taking a long pull on a mug of beer. “Now, though, Phos the lord of the great and good mind be praised, I think we have enough and to spare.”

His mother said, “Don’t speak too soon.”

“Come on, Tatze, what could go wrong?” his father answered, smiling. “It’s in the ground and safe.”

Two days later, the Kubratoi came. They came in greater numbers and with more weapons than they’d had escorting the new villagers away from the mass of Videssian captives. At their shouted orders, the villagers opened one storage pit in three and loaded the precious grain onto pack-horses the wild men had brought with them. When they were done, the Kubratoi trotted off to plunder the next village.

Krispos’ father stood a long time, staring down into the empty yard-deep holes in the sandy soil back of the village. Finally, with great deliberation, he spat into one of them. “Locusts,” he said bitterly. “They ate us out just like locusts. We would have had plenty, but we’ll all be hungry before spring comes.”

“We ought to fight them next time, Phostis,” said one of the younger men who had come from the same village as Krispos and his family. “Make them pay for what they steal.”

But Krispos’ father sadly shook his head. “I wish we could, Stankos, when I see what they’ve done to us. They’d massacre us, though, I fear. They’re soldiers, and it’s the nature of soldiers to take. Farmers endure.”

Roukhas was still Phostis’ rival for influence in the village, but now he agreed with him. “Four or five years ago the village of Gomatou, over a couple of days west of here, tried rising up against the Kubratoi,” he said.

“Well? What happened to it?” Stankos asked.

“It’s not there anymore,” Roukhas said bleakly. “We watched the smoke go up into the sky.”

No one spoke of rebellion again. To Krispos, charging out against the Kubratoi with sword and lance and bow and driving them all back north over the Astris River to the plains from which they’d come would have been the most glorious thing in the world. It was one of his playmates’ favorite games. In truth, though, the wild men were the ones with the arms and armor and horses and, more important still, both the skill and will to use them.

Farmers endure,
Krispos thought. He didn’t like just enduring. He wondered if that meant he shouldn’t be a farmer. What else could he be, though? He had no idea.

T
HE VILLAGE GOT THROUGH THE WINTER, WHICH WAS FIERCER
than any Krispos remembered. Even the feast and celebrations of Midwinter’s Day, the day when the sun finally turned north in the sky, had to be forgotten because of the blizzard raging outside.

Krispos grew to hate being cooped up and idle in the house for weeks on end. South of the mountains, even midwinter gave days when he could go out to play in the snow. Those were few and far between here. Even a freezing trip out to empty the chamber pot on the dung heap or help his father haul back firewood made him glad to return to the warm—if stuffy and smoky—air inside.

Spring came at last and brought with it mud almost as oppressive as the snow had been. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and weeding followed, plunging Krispos back into the endless round of farm work and making him long for the lazy days of winter once more. That fall, the Kubratoi came to take their unfair share of the harvest once more.

The year after that, they came a couple of other times, riding through the fields and trampling down long swathes of growing grain. As they rode, they whooped and yelled and grinned at the helpless farmers whose labor they were wrecking.

“Drunk, the lot of ’em,” Krispos’ father said the night after it happened the first time, his mouth tight with disgust. “Pity they didn’t fall off their horses and break their fool necks—that’d send ’em down to Skotos where they belong.”

“Better to thank Phos that they didn’t come into the village and hurt people instead of plants,” Krispos’ mother said. Phostis only scowled and shook his head.

Listening, Krispos found himself agreeing with his father. What the Kubratoi had done was wrong, and they’d done it on purpose. If he deliberately did something wrong, he got walloped for it. The villagers were not strong enough to wallop the Kubratoi, so let them spend eternity with the dark god and see how they liked that.

When fall came, of course, the Kubratoi took as much grain as they had before. If, thanks to them, less was left for the village, that was the village’s hard luck.

The wild men played those same games the next year. That year, too, a woman who had gone down to the stream to bathe never came back. When the villagers went looking for her, they found hoofprints from several horses in the clay by the streambank.

Krispos’ father held his mother very close when the news swept through the village. “
Now
I will thank Phos, Tatze,” he said. “It could have been you.”

One dawn late in the third spring after Krispos came to Kubrat, barking dogs woke the villagers even before they would have risen on their own. Rubbing their eyes, they stumbled from their houses to find themselves staring at a couple of dozen armed and mounted Kubratoi. The riders carried torches. They scowled down from horseback at the confused and frightened farmers.

Krispos’ hair tried to rise at the back of his neck. He hadn’t thought, lately, about the night the Kubratoi had kidnapped him and everyone else in his village. Now the memories—and the terror—of that night flooded back. But where else could the wild men take them from here? Why would they want to?

One of the riders drew his sword. The villagers drew back a pace. Someone moaned. But the Kubrati did not attack with the curved blade. He pointed instead, westward. “You come with us,” he said in gutturally accented Videssian. “Now.”

Krispos’ father asked the questions the boy was thinking: “Where? Why?”

“Where I say, man bound to the earth. Because I say.” This time the horseman’s gesture with the sword was threatening.

At nine, Krispos knew more of the world and its harsh ways than he had at six. Still, he did not hesitate. He sprang toward the Kubrati. His father grabbed at him to haul him back, too late. “You leave him alone!” Krispos shouted up at the rider.

The man snarled at him, teeth gleaming white in the torchlight’s flicker. The sword swung up. Krispos’ mother screamed. Then the wild man hesitated. He thrust his torch down almost into Krispos’ face. Suddenly, astonishingly, the snarl became a grin. The Kubrati said something in his own language. His comrades exclaimed, then roared laughter.

He dropped back into Videssian. “Ha, little khagan, you forget me? Good thing I remember you, or you die this morning. You defy me once before, in Videssos. How does farmer boy come to have man’s—Kubrati man’s—spirit in him?”

Krispos hadn’t recognized the rider who’d captured him and his family. If the man recognized him, though, he would turn it to his advantage. “Why are you here? What do you want with us now?”

“To take you away.” The scowl came back to the Kubrati’s face. “Videssos has paid ransom for you. We have to let you go.” He sounded anything but delighted at the prospect.

“Ransom?” The word spread through the villagers, at first slowly and in hushed, disbelieving tones, then louder and louder till they all shouted it, nearly delirious with joy. “Ransom!”

They danced round the Kubratoi, past hatred and fear dissolved in the powerful water of freedom. It was, Krispos thought, like a Midwinter’s Day celebration somehow magically dropped into springtime. Soon riders and villagers were hoisting wooden mugs of beer together. Barrel after barrel was broken open. Little would be left for later, but what did that matter? They would not be here later. A new cry took the place of “Ransom!”

“We’re going home!”

Evdokia was puzzled. “What does everyone mean, Krispos, we’re going home? Isn’t this home?”

“No, silly, the place Mother and Father talk about all the time is our real home.”

“Oh.” His sister barely remembered Videssos. “How is it different?”

“It’s…” Krispos wasn’t too clear on that himself, not after almost three years. “It’s better,” he finished at last. That seemed to satisfy her. He wondered if it was true. His own memories of life south of the mountains had grown hazy.