The Tale of Krispos Read online

  “Soldiers?” Krispos said, amazed. That Videssian troopers might be riding after the Kubratoi had never crossed his mind. “You mean the Empire cares enough about us to fight to get us back?”

  His father’s chuckle had little real amusement in it. “I know the only time you ever saw soldiers was that time a couple of years ago, when the harvest was so bad they didn’t trust us to sit still for the tax collector unless he had archers at his back. But aye, they might fight to get us back. Videssos needs farmers on the ground as much as Kubrat does. Everybody needs farmers, boy; it’d be a hungry world without ’em.”

  Most of that went over Krispos’ head. “Soldiers,” he said again, softly. So he—for that was how he thought of it—was so important the Avtokrator would send soldiers to return him to his proper place! Then it was as if—well, almost as if—he had caused those soldiers to be sent. And surely that was as if—well, perhaps as if—he were Avtokrator himself. It was a good enough dream to fall asleep on, anyhow.

  When he woke up the next morning, he was certain something was wrong. He kept peering around, trying to figure out what it was. At last his eyes went up to the strip of rock far overhead that the rising sun was painting with light. “That’s the wrong direction!” he blurted. “Look! The sun’s coming up in the west!”

  “Phos have mercy, I think the lad’s right!” Tzykalas the cobbler said close by. He drew a circle on his breast, itself the sign of the good god’s sun. Other people started babbling; Krispos heard the fear in their voices.

  Then his father yelled “Stop it!” so loudly that they actually did. Into that sudden silence, Phostis went on, “What’s more likely, that the world has turned upside down or that this canyon’s wound around so we couldn’t guess east from west?”

  Krispos felt foolish. From the expressions on the folk nearby, so did they. In a surly voice, Tzykalas said, “Your boy was the one who started us hopping, Phostis.”

  “Well, so he was. What about it? Who’s the bigger fool, a silly boy or the grown man who takes him seriously?”

  Someone laughed at that. Tzykalas flushed. His hands curled into fists. Krispos’ father stood still and quiet, waiting. Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Tzykalas turned away. Two or three more people laughed then.

  Krispos’ father took no notice of them. Quietly he said, “The next time things aren’t the way you expect, son, think before you talk, eh?”

  Krispos nodded. He felt foolish now himself. One more thing to remember, he thought. The bigger he got, the more such things he found. He wondered how grown people managed to keep everything straight.

  Late that afternoon, the canyon opened up. Green land lay ahead, land not much different from the fields and forests around Krispos’ home village. “Is that Kubrat?” he asked, pointing.

  One of the wild men overheard him. “Is Kubrat. Is good to be back. Is home,” he said in halting Videssian.

  Till then, Krispos hadn’t thought about the raiders having homes—to him, they had seemed a phenomenon of nature, like a blizzard or a flood. Now, though, a happy smile was on the Kubrati’s face. He looked like a man heading home after some hard work. Maybe he had little boys at that home, or little girls. Krispos hadn’t thought about the raiders having children, either.

  He hadn’t thought about a lot of things, he realized. When he said that out loud, his father laughed. “That’s because you’re still a child. As you grow, you’ll work through the ones that matter to you.”

  “But I want to be able to know about all those things now,” Krispos said. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Maybe not.” No longer laughing, his father put a hand on his shoulder. “But I’ll tell you this—a chicken comes out of its egg knowing everything it needs to know to be a chicken. There’s more to being a man; it takes a while to learn. So which would you rather be, son, a chicken or a man?”

  Krispos folded his hands into his armpits and flapped imaginary wings. He let out a couple of loud clucks, then squealed when his father tickled his ribs.

  The next morning, Krispos saw in the distance several—well, what were they? Neither tents nor houses, but something in between. They had wheels and looked as if animals could pull them. His father did not know what to call them, either.

  “May I ask one of the Kubratoi?” Krispos said.

  His mother started to shake her head, but his father said, “Let him, Tatze. We may as well get used to them, and they’ve liked the boy ever since he stood up to them that first night.”

  So he asked one of the wild men trotting by on his pony. The Kubrati stared at him and started to laugh. “So the little khagan does not know of yurts, eh? Those are yurts you see, the perfect homes for following the flocks.”

  “Will you put us in yurts, too?” Krispos liked the idea of being able to live now one place, now another.

  But the horseman shook his head. “You are farmer folk, good only for raising plants. And as plants are rooted to the ground, your houses will be rooted, too.” He spat to show his contempt for people who had to stay in one spot, then touched the heels of his boots to his horse’s flanks and rode off.

  Krispos looked after him, a little hurt. “I’ll travel, too, one day,” he said loudly. The Kubrati paid no attention to him. He sighed and went back to his parents. “I will travel!” he told his father. “I will.”

  “You’ll travel in a few minutes,” his father answered. “They’re getting ready to move us along again.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Krispos said. “I meant travel when I want to, and go where I want to.”

  “Maybe you will, son.” His father sighed, rose, and stretched. “But not today.”

  JUST AS CAPTIVES FROM MANY VIDESSIAN VILLAGES HAD JOINED together to make one large band on the way to Kubrat, so now they were taken away from the main group—five, ten, twenty families at a time, to go off to the lands they would work for their new masters.

  Most of the people the Kubratoi told to go off with the group that included Krispos’ father were from his village, but some were not, and some of the villagers had to go someplace else. When they protested being broken up, the wild men ignored their pleas. “Not as if you were a clan the gods formed,” a raider said, the same scorn in his voice that Krispos had heard from the Kubrati who explained what yurts were. And, like that rider, he rode away without listening to any reply.

  “What does he mean, gods?” Krispos asked. “Isn’t there just Phos? And Skotos,” he added after a moment, naming the good god’s wicked foe in a smaller voice.

  “The Kubratoi don’t know of Phos,” his father told him. “They worship demons and spirits and who knows what. After they die, they’ll spend forever in Skotos’ ice for their wickedness, too.”

  “I hope there are priests here,” Tatze said nervously.

  “We’ll get along, whether or not,” Phostis said. “We know what the good is, and we’ll follow it.” Krispos nodded. That made sense to him. He always tried to be good—unless being bad looked like a lot more fun. He hoped Phos would forgive him. His father usually did, and in his mind the good god was a larger version of his father, one who watched the whole world instead of just a farm.

  Later that day, one of the Kubratoi pointed ahead and said, “There your new village.”

  “It’s big!” Krispos said. “Look at all the houses!”

  His father had a better idea of what to look for. “Aye, lots of houses. Where are the people, though? Hardly any in the fields, hardly any in the village.” He sighed. “I expect the reason I don’t see ’em is that they’re not there to see.”

  As the party of Kubratoi and captives drew near, a few men and women did emerge from their thatch-roofed cottages to stare at the newcomers. Krispos had never had much. These thin, poorly clad wretches, though, showed him other folk could have even less.

  The wild men waved the village’s new inhabitants forward to meet the old. Then they wheeled their horses and rode away…rode, Krispos supposed, back to their
yurts.

  As he came into the village, he saw that many of the houses stood empty; some were only half thatched, others had rafters falling down, still others had chunks of clay gone from the wall to reveal the woven branches within.

  His father sighed again. “I suppose I should be glad we’ll have roofs over our heads.” He turned to the families uprooted from Videssos. “We might as well pick out the places we’ll want to live in. Me, I have my eye on that house right there.” He pointed to an abandoned dwelling as dilapidated as any of the others, set near the edge of the village.

  As he and Tatze, followed by Krispos and Evdokia, headed toward the home they had chosen, one of the men who belonged to this village came up to confront him. “Who do you think you are, to take a house without so much as a by-your-leave?” the fellow asked. Even to a farm boy like Krispos, his accent sounded rustic.

  “My name’s Phostis,” Krispos’ father said. “Who are you to tell me I can’t, when this place is falling to pieces around you?”

  The other newcomers added their voices to his. The man looked from them to his own followers, who were fewer and less sure of themselves. He lost his bluster as a punctured bladder loses air. “I’m Roukhas,” he said. “Headman here, at least until all you folk came.”

  “We don’t want what’s yours, Roukhas,” Krispos’ father assured him. He smiled a sour smile. “Truth is, I’d be just as glad never to have met you, because that’d mean I was still back in Videssos.” Even Roukhas nodded at that, managing a wry chuckle. Phostis went on, “We’re here, though, and I don’t see much point in having to build from scratch when there’re all these places ready to hand.”

  “Aye, well, put that way, I suppose you have a point.” Roukhas stepped backward and waved Phostis toward the house he had chosen.

  As if his concession were some sort of signal, the rest of the longtime inhabitants of the village hurried up to mingle with the new arrivals. Indeed, they fell on them like long-lost cousins—as, Krispos thought, a little surprised at himself, they were.

  “They didn’t even know what the Avtokrator’s name was,” Krispos’ mother marveled as the family settled down to sleep on the ground inside their new house.

  “Aye, well, they need to worry about the khagan more,” his father answered. Phostis yawned an enormous yawn. “A lot of ’em, too, were born right here, not back home. I shouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t even remember there was an Avtokrator.”

  “But still,” Krispos’ mother said, “they talked with us as we would with someone from the capital, from Videssos the city—someone besides the tax man, I mean. And we’re from the back of beyond.”

  “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.”

  LIFE 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.